I was too lazy to post this last night but here’s the video of Stewart’s speech.

I thought this was a really good speech but most of the people I usually agree with had opinions ranging from mild annoyance to outright disgust at this.

So… discuss. Good? Bad? Terrible? Agree? Disagree?

And if you don’t like it or feel like listening just enjoy the autotuned version:

There’s been this huge debate amongst progressives and liberals about Jon Stewart’s Rally that took place on October 30, called the Rally to Restore Sanity. Basically virtually every major progressive media figure offline and online to whom I listen to frequently and most often agree with took the time to viciously criticize The Rally for creating a False Equivalence between Fox News and the Left and ridiculing and attacking activism.

I surprised myself while observing all this in that I discovered myself to be pretty firmly on Jon Stewart’s side. And that’s coming from someone who hates false equivalences and is a huge fan of activism. I definitely got the points of all those critics and I think they made some good ones. However, I think overall, THEY were missing the point. They weren’t seeing the bigger picture.

There’s this thing the Left does that makes me a little ashamed of being a part of it at times. We have a tendency to viciously attack one another on moral grounds. It’s not solely a tendency of the Left but it is frustratingly common amongst our leaders. Though our arguments aren’t made up or grounded in fiction they are still not always the most fair or the most reasoned.

For some reason the Left has become pretty bad at strategy too. That’s why at every level the Right has been kicking its ass badly for 30 years. We’re great on specific issues but terrible at seeing the big picture. At every level we fail at that. At the level of Media, at the level of activism, and at the level of politics. Our overarching strategies have been near complete and utter failures. We win battles but we’re losing the war for hearts and minds and we’re losing it pretty badly. (To be fair we have regained extraordinary ground in the last six years or so, but that’s why this past year, and especially the last six months have been so terrifying. It seems like we are losing that ground at an insanely rapid rate)

But what’s interesting to me is that we weren’t bad strategists during the Civil Rights era. In fact they were pretty great strategists then. They managed to mobilize people in ways the world hasn’t seen since. And they had a huge impact. And that’s not so much in the legislation that was passed or the rules that got changed. That’s in how they changed the entire mindset of the country. We became more inclusive, more fair, more willing to at least TRY to treat one another as equals no matter our race or gender and even in some cases sexual orientation. But the landscape shifted beneath our feet and for some reason the Left never really caught up with the changing times. We kept trying the same old things and we didn’t get any better at doing them either. Our great leaders were shot or locked up or were discredited and those that took their place though well meaning lacked the vision. We never really recovered.

Meanwhile the Right has developed extroardinarily skilled strategists. Media geniuses like Limbaugh and Beck. Political masters like Gingrich and Rove. They’ve had no shortage of people who are planning for the BIG picture. And they are totally willing and able to use all of the lessons learned from the successes of the Left as well as any other tools of the modern era and build upon them and use them to their ends. And they do. Beautifully. Effectively.

Here’s the thing. 3 Million people a week watch Glenn Beck. If you think that’s a small number compared to how many people live in the country you are deluding yourself. That’s a massive number to be watching one demagogue. And they talk to people. They interact with people. The message that appears on Glenn Beck doesn’t stop at his 3 Million fans. And that doesn’t even take into account the millions of people who listen to his radio program or the many millions who listen to Rush Limbaugh who are sometimes different people.

One top of that at least tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people attended Beck’s rally and many more attended the several other conservative rallies and marches that have been held over the past two years. But much more important than the attendance numbers,  everybody knew about that Beck rally.  It was a media events. You couldn’t escape it no matter where you went. That’s why it was a success. Because no matter how many people attended, everybody heard their conservative message. It was everywhere.

And part of that message is: if you don’t believe as we do, you’re evil. You’re dangerous. You’re stupid. You’re destroying the nation and a direct threat to the well being of the good and true “normal” Americans. They have lots of other messages some good some horrible, but by far that’s the WORST of their messages. The one that tells people that their kids and neighbors and fellow Americans who live on the coasts have something fundamentally wrong with them because they believe it’s possible to create a government that can help people without creating a society run by tyranny. It’s a message that pits people against each other and trains people to accept the practice of othering various groups and peoples from muslims to illegal immigrants to blacks to gays. This tells them it’s okay to be angry at them. It’s fine to hate them. They’re really to blame. Those evil liberals.

If you don’t believe that’s a fundamental part of their message, I recommend you read some of the comments on my blog. Or ANY blog that gets considerable conservative commentary. Listen to how they react to anything remotely resembling “liberalism”.

The scary thing is when people are worried and afraid and don’t know what to do that message is extraordinarily convincing. People who worked their whole lives living within what they thought were the rules are looking for someone to blame. They are looking for someone to let out their anger and frustration at. And so they love to hear that there’s this conspiracy of monstrous people called liberals that they can vent at and hate. Not everybody does. But enough do. 

And many of those who don’t are just confused enough that they’ll latch onto anything that seems remotely plausible as an explanation for their collapsing shifting world. Anybody who offers them a sense of stability and normalcy. Being a part of the Fox News community gives them that. Glenn Beck tells them what’s wrong in simple terms they can understand. It’s the libs. It’s that evil philosophy of progressivism. Stick with me and I’ll bring you back to your happy conservative values. That’s his message.

Indeed when I watched the interviews with attendees of Glenn Beck’s rally that’s what stood out the most to me. It was how very happy people were to be there. They were having a good time. There was a sense of community and togetherness amongst them. They felt good about what they were doing.

And I don’t begrudge them that happiness or that sense of community and purpose. I think it’s a good thing. I’m just terrified of Glenn Beck’s message of hatred and ignorance that underlies it. THAT’s the problem. Teaching people to associate these good feelings of togetherness with and unity with hatred of the other and vilification of alternative ideologies can’t be a good thing.

The only question then that the Left needs to ask is HOW CAN WE COUNTER THAT MESSAGE?

And there’s no easy answer to that. It’s going to take a lot of different things and a lot of new creative thinkign. It’s going to require a lot of experimentation too.

But here’s what we know won’t work. Doing what we’ve been doing. And by that I mean having smart hosts on MSNBC that simply shout out the alternative viewpoint. Yes they serve a good purpose and yes it’s great that not everything that Fox News says goes without challenge somewhere in the media. But that doesn’t sway the country either. Nor does it, apparently, motivate sufficient numbers of the disenfranchised or depressed to go out and vote either.

Similarly the many many many many normal Left wing marches and protests don’t work. That’s not to say that they are entirely a waste of time. They do serve a good purpose of linking activists together and building networks. But they don’t force major legislative changes either. They don’t scare anyone. They don’t get the country behind them. Indeed they don’t even command enough of an audience to cause them to get much press in the News media at all. And as much as we may like to whine about how the Media is being fundamentally “unfair” because many of those marches were bigger and deserved a lot more attention, the fact is media companies probably WOULD cover a rally if they thought it would sell. But no. They think these rally’s and marches don’t rate. They believe that even if they did cover them, they’d be so boring and inconsequential that the television audience wouldn’t even pay them any heed. Just more of the same they’d think. And legislators have learned to studiously ignore these marches too so that can’t be the angle for the story either.

So you’d need a truly phenomenal number of people to march to break into the modern media scene with a traditional cause. It just doesn’t work anymore like it used to. People need to start to take that into account.

But Glenn Beck’s rally DID work because he based it off of celebrity and it was something new and different and because it was radically opposed to the position of most marches. That made it interesting to people. Glenn Beck himself is a lightning rod for controversy. Even the timing, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was a brilliant move to gin up extra controversey and garner more attention. All this brought the reporters out.

At that point it didn’t even matter how many people Beck got out to the mall. He would have claimed victory even if it was only 20,000. And in a lot of ways he’d be right.  All he needed was for the rally to be big enough not to be seen as joke.

So what do you do? Traditional strategies don’t work. Beck and Limbaugh are eating your lunch. Who’s innovating?

Jon Stewart that’s who.

Jon Stewart took a different approach. What if you answer the core problem of Beck’s message and his undeserved media fame by directly showing how silly it was. Glenn Beck says that everybody else out there who doesn’t think like he does is a monster. So Jon Stewart said, “okay, here we are, 200,000 of us. Do we look like monsters to you?”

He demonstrated that you could bring together a massive crowd of mostly Left leaning people who were NOT demonic and indeed were ANTI-demonic. They were people who argued for “sanity” and civility and mocked “fear-based” politics.  And they were fun loving joking friendly and above all normal people. Here were your friends and neighbors and children just getting together and having a good time. These were the people Glenn Beck tells you it would be a disaster if you let them take control? Did they seem like people who would bring about the end of the world? Is a world where people watch the Daily Show really so bad?

The overall theme of Stewart’s rally was that we’re more alike than we seem. Not Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann or Barack Obama and Sarah Palin but maybe a listener to Rush Limbaugh and a watcher of Keith Olbermann.  Maybe a voter for Obama and a voter for  McCain/Palin. We all live our lives the best we can. And that’s EXACTLY the right messgae to counter that of Glenn Beck which is that we’re not all that alike. Those progressive are NOT like you. They’re the enemy. They’re dangerous. They’re trying to destroy you and enslave you and they probably don’t even realize they’re doing it those poor deluded fools. That’s Beck’s message.

But more important even than the theme of Stewart’s rally was the spirit of it. I don’t even think of Stewart’s rally as your traditional March or Rally. Most of those are protests or advocacy trying to agitate for something specific. Stewart’s wasn’t that. It was nothing like that at all. But it still had meaning. Stewart’s rally was a gigantic sort of national Pep Rally. It was a giant party. It was in effect a way to cheer people up in the exact same way Glenn Beck’s rally did but NOT have that underlying message of hatred. Instead beneathe Stewart’s rally was a message of unity and hope.

And we needed it. Now more than ever. People were and are really really incredibly depressed. So many of Obama’s voters didn’t turn up because they were in pain and in trouble and depressed and thinking that system is fundamentally broken and they are surrounded by people who hate them. They’re tired of defending Obama, tired of defending the Democrats and tired of fighting to stay afloat in this miserable economy. And most of all they’re tired of the bickering and fighting that results in nothing getting done in Washington. You think you can get these depressed, out of touch, borderline angry people to vote? How? You’re lucky if you can keep them from falling completely into despair and giving up on politics altogether.

A lot of people complaining about Stewart’s rally are upset because he didn’t ask for people to vote and make it a rally all about electing democrats.There’s two problems with that argument. One do you really think that would have made an overwhelming difference? I don’t. That late in the game it maybe would have shifted one or two seats if you were really lucky. 200K is a good number of people but spread all around the country, I’m skeptical. A huge number of the people there were probably people who would have voted anyway and a good chunk were probably people who weren’t going to vote no matter what Stewart said.  You can’t pretend that a single rally is going to have a sway big enough to undercut a massive unemployment rate and serious dissatisfact over a whole plethora of Obama’s policies. Pretending otherwise is to embue in Stewart a kind of God-like influence I’m sure he wishes he has.

But worse than that, making this a Rally abotu Democrats might have been decent tactics but it would have been terrible Strategy. No matter how much we on the Left might wish it’s not so a vast majority of the independents and people in the center and even a good large chunk of the leftists are directly turned off by the political infighting that happens on a daily basis. They don’t WANT to be told to vote and who to vote for or to be “mobilized” to serve the interests of a political class they don’t trust. They hate the shouting that goes on on Cable Television and they wish there were resources out there that would give them a real education in political matters without all the bullshit. And they don’t think Republicans are fundamentally evil and they don’t really care about which is better Fox News or MSNBC.

When Obama ran he mobilized a lot of these people and a part of his allure is becausse he portrayed himself as being above the stupid partisan fray and was not possessed of ideological riggidness that would cloud his judgment. And yet at the same time he gave people a message of hope and the idea that people really could get along and make things better.

And people really really do respond to that message. They respond to it when it’s Jon Stewart saying it and when Barack Obama was saying it.  No matter how much you don’t like that bi-partisanship message or think it gets perverted into something grotesque in the political sphere (and believe me I do) it still brings people together. The fact is, A LOT of people will simply NOT listen to you if you sound like you are expressing a view that clearly favors one side over another or if you are painted by Glenn Beck as a shill for MSNBC. They will assume you’re “just like all the rest” and tune you off before they even hear a word you say.

You have to deal with people as they are not as you wish they would be. We do live in a country where 3 million people watch Glenn Beck and we live in a country where the vast silent masses of non-voters don’t watch anything and avoid politics like the plague because they think it’s because sick and twisted and wrong and has no real bearing on their lives.

You have to win one or two of those groups over.  I don’t know how. Nobody knows really. But the same old tactics just won’t work. We need to think of really long term strategies and start experimenting on how to really make a difference.

That’s what I think of Stewart’s Rally. It was an experiment in a different kind of mobilizing of people around a different kind of model than traditional activism. And I think it worked reasonably well all things considered. People had a good time and felt energized by the process. Maybe some people were inspired to get involved. Maybe some people just were able to keep the despair and discouragement at bay for a little while longer. Maybe it just made people feel a little less alone.

And I think that keeps a step further away from the dark place it sometimes seems like we’ve been falling closer and closer to lately. It sometimes feels like were are on the verge of falling into something really really bad and ugly and Stewart is one of those on the edges trying to pull us back up.

And on top of all that, given all the Good that Stewart and Colbert have done on their shows for the last however many years, don’t they deserve at least a little bit of the benefit of the doubt? 

Do we really think the energy of our Left wing leaders is best spent railing against these two for daring tho mention MSNBC in the same sentence as Fox as if there might be some similarities between the two networks, something that most people in the country already believe? Aren’t there a lot bigger fish to fry?

I’ve always said you shouldn’t withhold criticize from anyone just because you like them, and I do believe that so I’m not saying Olbermann or Maddow or Maher or any of the rest shouldn’t have criticized Stewart. But I am saying the vehemence with which they went after him was excessive and I’d think so even if I didn’t think their criticism was fundamentally misguided and short sighted. At the very least I think they should take more seriously what Stewart was doing and what he was trying to accomplish.

Anyway, Stewart will be appearing on the Rachel Maddow program soon and I’ll be very curious to see if or how they hash out their differences.

Stewart already did a great segment in which he mocked his critics. One line in particular stood out to me.It was along the lines of Stewart’s critics were acting as if the only thing that was important was which side was worse the Left or the Right.

I think that statement is profound. Which side is worse is NOT the most important thing. That’s the narrowminded of a viewpoint that prevents our movement from growing. Changing this society for the better is going to require more than simply proving the other side stands for something bad. It’s going to require proving that WE can stand for something GOOD and that we can explain that Good to people in such a way that they can be compelled to believe in it.

Approximately once a week I get a spam message on my Xanga comments.  Usually it’s a registered user. Usually it’s a comment on a really old blog post that nobody reads anymore. Occasionally it’s on a recent post, such as the one I just got today on by blog post about who will follow Obama as President.

The spam is fundamentally the same. It’s usually some nonsense pretend serious comment followed by a link to somewhere that I don’t dare click on. The key of course is the link. It’s trying to get stupid people to click. The text is irrelevant.

Why is my Xanga so attractive to spam? I regularly block known spam accounts and delete spam messages but they still appear. What can I do to reduce this spam amount? Do I have to just suffer through it or disable comments?

What can XANGA do to reduce the frequency of spam?  Well as always I have some ideas.

How about a way to lock older posts from getting comments while keeping your newer posts comment worthy? How about the ability to limit users ability to post links in comments? Or a way to limit the length of comments? Those things would radically reduce the value of spam comments? How about a dedicated learning spam filter you can apply to your account akin to what we have in emails? How about a system where we can approve of comments before they appear on our blogs?

Do you have spam problems? What do you think is the best way to handle it personally and for Xanga as a whole?

Roger Ebert posted this video on his blog and I find that I have an irrationally excessive love for it.

It’d be awesome if more people thought and talked like this.

I heard an interesting discussion about George W. Bush’s legacy during which someone said something that I thought was incredibly stupid. 

He started off not so bad. He basically argued that Bush’s far Left-wing criticizers were idiots who were hurting their own cause by criticizing him in ways such as calling him Hitler-like or arguing that he engineered 9/11 on purpose.

Alright I was with him that far. I too think that those who criticize Bush to that extreme are being really dumb. You don’t accuse someone of being Hitler-like unless they are actually implementing the gas chambers or else you look like a damn fool. And you don’t say someone engineered a travesty as serious as 9/11 unless you have some convincing irrefutable evidence to that end. I’ve never seen any such evidence. And so I agree that making those kinds of accusations makes Left wing critics look pretty stupid and ultimately hurts their cause. It hurts because it distracts people from all of the very REAL things that you can PROVE that the Bush administration did that are very much worthy of critique. Things like starting a war in Iraq based on nothing.

It’s the same with the Right wing though. When they make accusations of Obama like that he’s the Anti-Christ or a Maoist Dictator, or that he was born in Kenya or that he’s a Muslim or that he’s setting up Death Panels that makes those Right-wing critics look really very dumb too. And I do think that hurts their cause at least amongst your average main stream Americans. And it likewise distracts from all of the many REAL things for which Obama really does deserve criticism. Things like having a problem to assassinate an American citizen accused of being a terror suspect without trial or allowing the country to remain at a 9.6% unemployment rate.

Well I shouldn’t really say it’s the SAME with the Right wing. There’s a huge huge difference. With those accusations on the Left I can think of NO major Left wing figures who had influence within the Democrat party who made those statements. I don’t recall any major Left wing scholars making those statements either. I don’t even recall any major Left wing media figures who kept harping on the Bush planned 9/11 conspiracy theory stuff. No. While it was a common sentiment amongst the masses on the Left who were speaking out their anger at President Bush it never rose to any level of prominence amongst the movement leaders. The closest it came is with the 9/11 Truth movement which attracted a lot of people on the Left and the Right. But even it over time moderated its propositions considerably from extreme accusations to simply calls of investigation. And the only major figure I know of associated with that movement was Van Jones and he was a minor low level perfunctory in the Obama White House who got fired. Even for him the extent of his involvement was simply the unwise signing of a single 9/11 Truth Movement petition.

In contrast, those accusations I listed on the Right come right from the very highest echelons of power within the Republican movement. Presidential hopefuls like Sarah Palin argue for the “Death Panels” line. Several Republican Senators and Representatives and candidates for those offices have catered to the Obama Birther conspiracy. And some of the most respected major Republican media figures accuse Obama of being a Muslim, of being a Maoist, of being a Racist and wish for his administration to Fail.

These are not equivalent. They could have been. Democrats probably would have been very successful had they given in to and catered to the conspiracy theorist crowd against George W. Bush. There were a LOT of people who believed that. A lot of people still do. And they are passionate about it. I think they’re very very very wrong and misguided. The responsible thing to do when encountering those philosophies is to deny them. And that, as far as I can tell is what most Democrats on a national level did. The two parties are not equivalent on that front.  Maybe in the future they will be, but right now it looks like the Democratic party is more responsible when it comes to trying to curb direct attacks based on unverified truths and lies. The Republican party used to be a lot better about that too but things have changed.

Anyway, that’s basically aside. It suffices to say that I agree with the speaker that many critics of Bush go way overboard in their criticism. I totally understand being angry at Bush and disliking the way he ran his administration. I don’t understand accusing him of being a diabolic monster.

But then the guy said something that completely through me for a loop. He said something like “Bush doesn’t deserve to receive such harsh criticism because he was elected by the American people and he did the best he could and that’s really the most you can ask for.”

And I thought… REALLY?!?! Is that the MOST you can ask for??

I could ask for a hell of lot more than that.  I could ask for all of our soldiers who died in Iraq’s lives back. I could ask for all the people who lost their lives in New Orleans from Katrina’s lives back. I could ask for NOT having a housing bubble and subsequent market crash that cost millions of Americans their homes and retirements. I could ask for a LOT.

And would you really accept simply the fact that someone did their best as justification for their actions no matter how bad? Would you say that it’s okay that the rapist rapes an underage child because he “did his best” to resist their urges? Would you say that incompetent doctor whose mistakes result in the deaths of numerous of his patients should be praised simply because he never gave up and always tried his hardest but his hardest just wasn’t good enough?

Here’s the thing. Since when is simply that they do their best the most we should expect from ANYONE let alone our LEADERS? Why is there this kind of pass we give to Presidents for simply being sincere and genuine and honest and hard workers? No doubt those are good characteristics for a President to have., but why is that enough?  Shouldn’t we want our Presidents to also be competent and intelligent and good leaders and good at their jobs and you know… moral?

If we’re judging Bush solely on his sincerity well then even *I* would probably give him a pass. I don’t doubt that he believed in everything he did and thought it was the right thing to. The problem is, it seemed to me that he was kinda a dunce. He never thought anything through. He was easily manipulated, not particularly clever, arrogant and stubbornly unwilling to change. But most of all he was disconnected from reality. To him, it seemed that putting people in harms way didn’t way heavily on his soul. It was more like Cops and Robbers for him. You have to defeat the Axis of Evil, the badguys and have the goodguy Americans win. But it shouldn’t be that way. Going to war should be the heaviest hardest decision anybody has to make. And when you do it you have to be fully aware of all the consequences and understand truly that the thing you are going into is fundamentally your responsibility. On top of all that he was stubbornly locked into views that caused him to think of certain people as second class citizens and certain societies as less significant than our own and seeing the lack of religion as making you someone less deserving of respect or equal rights under the law. And he rejected science and thought it was perfectly okay to manipulate the facts to deceive people if it was in service of what he perceived as a greater “good”. All of that to me makes him far from deserving of the position of President.

Perhaps you think that I’m being too harsh. And indeed I readily admit that I can’t KNOW that all of these characteristics are true of Bush deep down inside. I can only really judge him on his actions and those of the people under him for which he held responsibility. And MANY of those I truly do find deplorable. But I do think that whether these deeper personality traits ARE true of Bush is really important to ask and talk about if you’re trying to exonerate Bush for what happened during his term. I don’t think Bush should be judged as being a really good person simply because he happened to be sincere and a hard worker and he got elected. That might be the beginning of your analysis but it can NOT be the end of it. It’s not enough simply that he “did his best”. Some people’s “best” just isn’t good enough for the job they are being given. In that case we should totally ask for them to either work to become better so that their “best” is at a higher level or we should ask that they be removed and someone whose “best” is up to the task be put in his place. Even better if they be rational and honest enough to admit that they are in over their heads and take a job more suited to their ability.

Doing your best is never the most you can ask of someone. If anything it’s almost the minimum you can ask of someone. It’s certainly not an adequate assessment system for a position as significant as President. You should also ask that people BE the best. Not everyone will be able to succeed at that, indeed no one really will completely, but that’s a real goal worth striving for and it’s a standard we can actually judge people against.

The question is, should the security council have a functional role or should it be merely a ceremonial title. Should the security council actively do stuff or just sit around preventing anyone from doing anything?

President Obama is calling for India to be added to the Security Council and that’s all well and good. Certainly they deserve a place and there’s no rational reason Security Council membership should be locked in time to the way it was setup to begin with. Relative power levels of nations change over time. Any idiot can see that.

But the Security Council is a single entity veto institution. That means that if  you just add more people to it then it is inevitably the case that there will be more vetos. The more people the more likely any given action will be something that someone objects to. The more vetos the less gets done. And if you add enough countries won’t it end up being the case that just nothing at all EVER gets done there. Already they rarely agree on anything. How will adding more people help the matter?

So by all means do the fair thing and expand the security council. But if you’re going to do that, you also need to change the way it works in some kind of fundamental way so that it can make more decisions without needing absolute unanimity.  I have no idea how to do that, but it needs to be done.  Either that or we should just get rid of the security council altogether.

Or is there something I’m not seeing or understanding? I admit I’m far from an expert on the United Nations. Feel free to enlighten me!

I’ve always felt that we highly underestimate the extent to which a President sets the conditions that enable their successor to take power. This is because we have a Democracy and we don’t directly appoint our successors so we can engage in a useful fiction of believing that there is no underlying power struggle outside of the voting game in the transition from one administration to another. In Dictatorships there are no such illusions. Leaders are well aware that THEIR decisions fundamentally determine whether their anointed successor will be able to have a stable reign or not.

In the United States, I’ve long had the theory that the reason we had Bush as our President had a lot less to do with Gore’s mistakes or Nader’s arrogance and a lot MORE to do with the way Bill Clinton governed. You see Clinton was so centrist, so very conservative for the time and so very collaborative with the Republicans that he lent extraordianry legitimacy to the ideas of the Gingrich revolution. At the same time Clinton was being vilified as the MOST Left Wing being Imaginable by a very concerted media effort to deligitimize his decisions.

The result was that the Climate Post-Clinton was more divided and at the same time ideologically shifted significantly to the right. Right wing ideas that had been unthinkable for society ten years before were now common place and considered brilliant and astute.

And because of this Americans weren’t all that shocked or surprised when a far more right wing President  than we’d had in a long time followed Clinton and appointed an administration filled with some of the most extremist figures in recent political history. And that’s how we ended up with 8 years of Bush. And whehter or not you think he did a good job I don’t think it’s possible to deny that the Bush administration is very extremist compared to other administrations in recent American history.

That’s not to say that Clinton, deliberately created Bush or intended for things to work out that way. No doubt he thought the opposite strategy would be more harmful. That is, he likely thought if he were too liberal then there would be some kind of backlash that would sweep in a more extreme conservative agenda.

And while that’s certainly possible it would likely require a level of liberalism so extreme as to be utterly unthinkable in today’s political climate. I mean honestly, we live in a world where the very term “socialism” is considered a epithet. Who really imagines that we could have someone so left wing that there would be a social backlash against it? And certainly if it was possible it wasn’t in Clinton’s DNA to be that far left.

No the bigger risk with Clinton was lending credibility to the extremists on the other side and at the same legitimizing the left wing of his own side. That’s what enabled Bush. Clinton created the Bush Presidency.

So if my hypothesis there is correct… who is it that Obama is creating right now?

I ask because it seems to me that President Obama is starting to engage in an almost identical kind of triangulation that Clinton did after he lost a bunch of seats in his first midterm election. I see Obama trying to prove that he is reasonable and fair by accepting more and more right wing ideas as legitimate. And at the same time he’s poo pooing anything remotely Left sounding and attacking his most left wing supporters in ways that I find deplorable.

Again, I don’t think Obama is doing this because he hates the Left and wants to see it die. Quite the opposite. I think he wants to be a Good and honest president who takes all views into account. And since right wing figures are right that deep down he probably is a bit more of a Liberal than a Conservative, he feels a constant need to directly fight that part of himself to ensure that he is fairly representing his conservative constiuents.

He doesn’t realize that he’s basically killing the Left wing movement. 

You see the right is fiercely attacking anything and everything he does as The Most Left Wing Thing Ever. So if what he does is things that are fairly Right of Center well then that becomes what people see as the LEFT. And that opens up all kinds of whacko crazy nonsense to be the new reasonable Right.

And that disturbs me greatly. I can’t help but worry about when Obama leaves power what kind of leader  will replace him? Will it really be someone totally… sane? I know I sound like I’m being excessive, but I totally see its possible.  You could really have a Sarah Palin or even a Glenn Beck as President.  And don’t think for a second that either of  them lack the ambition. Or it could be someone even worse than then. And it IS possible for someone like that to win. They can eek out a victory on the margins, especially if people are blaming all the economy’s woes on the incumbent. It might be unlikely and certainly a more mainstream republican candidate might have a better chance but so what? Even a small chance is way too big of chance to me.

That’s why when people talk about the more moderate candidates winning the Republican nomination with fear because they might well crush the Democratic nominee, I don’t react that way. It might be bad for the Democratic party certainly and that might mean a lot of the policies that I want to be enacted won’t be enacted which would suck. But I think maybe not be so bad if this moderate candidate is able to introduce some moderation into the Republican party platform. And it’s certainly better to me to have an honest race against a reasonable opponent than to risk giving the reigns of power over to someone who I think is utterly unqualified and not quite sane. This I find to especially true since we’ve spent the last 30 years greatly expanding executive power in this country. If the wrong person seizes the reigns of this great power you could have a President on the Right who is as extreme and out of control as those like Glenn Beck irrationally claims Obama to be on the Left.

That makes it all the more important to have someone in that office who is grounded in reality and open to facts regardless of where their political bent lies.

In other words I’d take a Mitch Daniels if he is as he appears to be over a Sarah Palin any day of the week as President. It’s not the case that all opponents are created equal just because they subscribe to the same ideology.

The question is who will Obama create? He’s still got a lot of time and a lot can happen in two years, but given how things are going now, what do you think?

One of the perhaps most annoying experiences in life is to meet someone who is just like you in many ways and discover that you absolutely can’t stand this person. It’s probably pretty rare in real life but much more frequent online because you are exposed to such a large variety of people.

Usually the reasons you can’t stand this person are one or more of two. Either you find that this person seems to be BETTER at being you than you are which is annoying. OR you find this person sort of flaunts many of the characteristics of yourself that seem to be to you to be your biggest flaws, sometimes flaws that you weren’t even aware of until you saw them displayed in someone else. Or both.

It’s SUCH an annoying experience that I generally tend to inevitably forget all about it up and until the moment where it happens AGAIN and I find it even MORE annoying than I did the last time.

So there’s only one rational thing to do about it.  You, obviously have to hunt down your doppelganger and engage in a fight to the death! Hopefully it will be some kind of mental contest or a battle of wills if you, like me, aren’t exactly the most proficient in hand to hand combat.

Once you are victorious you will absorb your doppelganger into yourself and become one entity with you in control. And on top of that you get all of your doppelganger’s stuff! And you can pick and choose the best amongst it and leave behind any of the junk you don’t want. So you get his televison, his car, his friends, his education, his playstation. What? What if he doesn’t HAVE a playstation? IMPOSSIBLE! No Doppelganger of mine would be lacking in the video gaming department!

Of course doing all that is very very troublesome and might not be worth the effort. So I guess instead you can just try to stop being such a dick and act more like you wish that doppelganger person would act.

But honestly the battle to the death sounds a lot more fun to me.

The idea of friendship triage is an idea I’ve had for a long time. The term is so perfect and clearly representative of the concept it stands for that it hardly requires any explanation at all. Indeed, I could stop writing right now and save yourself the burden of not-reading this and be pretty sure that you all basically “get” it.

But we all know that’s not going to happen. It is in my nature to write long and lengthy winding explanations for things that are in many ways obvious. Likewise it is in your nature, most likely, to skim my explanations and post either angry or inane and occasionally witty rejoinders. That’s just the contract. That’s the way this whole blogging thing works. And I suppose someone out there likes it that way cuz I don’t know how to make it work any differently.

This post, though, will be somewhat serious and it took me a long time (as in several years) and several attempts to write it. Why, if the concept is so simple did it take me several years to write? Well largely it WASN’T simple to me until I came up for a good name for it. Before that I was just thinking about friendship in generic terms and it wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. I only came up with the term friendship triage a couple of months ago.

I’m not sure if what I am about to say really makes sense but it’s an understanding I’ve come to have about the nature of life’s decision making. And I believe it will be valuable for others to have. I hope it will help people when they are having a hard time. If nothing else though I hope it will help people to understand ME a little better. Or if not let, I hope it will at least be a little bit entertaining.

You see when people think of friendship they act as if they have no agency in the matter. It’s as if your friends are your “friends” and that’s all there is to it. You stick with them. You support them. They’re like a part of you. Anything that interferes with this connection be it you or the other person is somehow fundamentally “wrong” or “evil”.

This is the way most literature portrays friendships as well. They are oh so often these timeless bonds forged in adamantium that nothing and no one can ever come between. Fights are always temporary, though sometimes they might last years, some kind of centrifugal force brings the friends back together again at which point there is a resolution that leads to a friendship resurrection and great joy is had by all. End of story. Either that or somebody commits suicide.

Blech.

I don’t believe that. It’s a terrible analogy for how people actually interact with their friends. Instead, what I’ve found is that what people are constantly doing is repeatedly making triage-like decisions with regards to who they keep and who they lose as friends. In effect, friendship is a battlefield and people are constantly being wounded intentionally or unintentionally by their friends and sometimes very deeply.

When you engage in friendship triage when a friendship takes a hit you evaluate it in a coldly logical fashion and sort it out to determine what happens next with the friendship. You can’t, unfortunately, undue the damage though at times we certainly wish we could. The bomb has already exploded. All you can do is move forward.

First you decide whether the wound is serious enough even to merit treatment. If it’s not then you just let the friendship go on its merry way trusting it to heal itself.

Second you decide if the wound is so serious that there is no hope for the friendship. In that case you cut all ties and let the friendship die. There’s no point expending extraordinary effort trying to save a friendship that will just collapse again under the weight of the fundamental unsolvable disagreements or differences in basic nature.

Third, if the wounded friendship fits in neither of those categories then it goes into the treatment category. From there you decide how deep is the wound and in what order should you treat it.  Hence if there are friendships that suffered deeper wounds that risk the friendship’s survival if they go untreated, you probably will treat them first and give them the majority of your attention.  Likewise if freindships are more important to you or are of greater long term value you might treat those above those more shallow lighter friendships. (This is akin to say treating the youngest victims first on the battlefield)

If there are friendship wounds that are significant but not of immediate danger to the life of the friendship then you might put a bandage on it. Sort of place a temporary hold in hopes that in a few days or a few weeks or a few months or a few years you might revisit the friendship and try to help heal the underlying untreated wounds which hopefully won’t be as fresh or as painful as they were when they were first inflicted.

That’s pretty much all the choices there are. You can split some of the categories down to even finer and finer levels but the core principles are expressed therein and it’s really almost exactly the same as the kind of reasoning used by battlefield medics to decide what to do with their wounded. And really we engage in triage like this in all kinds of aspects of our lives. Like for example when deciding when to keep a job or whether a financial investment is worth while, or whether you should drop a class or drop out of a school. Is the patient as good as dead? Is the patient fine? Can the patient be saved? What priority should we place on treating the patient?

There are, however, two complications in the friendship case that might contribute to the fact that a lot of people end up making stupid irrational decisions when it comes to friendship triage that they might not make when it comes to other kinds of triage, especially battlefield triage.

The first is of course that when you engage in this kind of triage you aren’t a dispassionate outsider making decisions about someone else’s life that is helplessly in your hands. It’s in fact almost the opposite. Often the person who is impacted the MOST from your triage decision is YOU. It’s a decision about how you are going to live the rest of your life and what will matter to you. What decision you make determines your own fate. It’s an emotional decision. It determines your own mental well being.

And unfortunately just like patients who are suffering are often the people in the WORST postion to make rational decisions about their own future, because they are suffering from too much emotional stress and trauma to think clearly, so too when you are making a friendship triage decision you are often the least qualified to make it clear-headedly. And that sucks. But at the same time nobody can make it FOR you either. Not if you expect to be fully satisfied with the outcome. It’s your own responsibility to decide what to do with your friendships. The good news is you probably won’t die based on your decision either way, at least not immediately. So you can LEARN from your decisions and practice and study and become BETTER at making these friendship triage decisions. And that is exactly the same as a battlefield medical triage getting training and having real world experience to ensure that they do a good job.

The second major difference is that there are multiple people involved in the decision making process for a friendship triage. As is generally the case in life the more brains working on a problem the more muddled the solution becomes. That’s not to say that more minds always come up with the wrong solution, but it is to say that often more minds create tensions that make it difficult to really come to a true solution. Things designed by committee OFTEN suck. It’s generally vastly superior to simply to go with one single entities vision. If nothing else it avoids a lot of the drama and hurt feelings that can ruin an endeavor.

So in the case of friendship you might have very strong mishmashes in terms of your evaluations of the state of the friendship that make it virtually impossible for the two of you to figure out what needs to be done. For example if we call our friends Friend A and Friend B we might see something like this:

Friend A: “I’m sorry B, but I think it’s clear we can no longer be friends.”
Friend B: “What? Huh? What the hell just happened?”

That is Friend A might have evaluated that a friendship was hopeless while Friend B didn’t even think whatever friend wound that was received merited even a slight degree of treatment. And that sucks hard.

Alternatively it might go like this:

Friend A: “Hi. I know we’ve had our difficulties but I’ve come up with this ten point plan for how we can talk out and work through our difficulties. I’m sure if we really work hard at it we can work through this and our friendship will be stronger than ever.”

Friend B: “Screw that. Good Bye for life sucker!”

Or like this:

Friend A: (same as above)
Friend B: “Umm. No. How about not. I like the friendship the way that it is now.”

Again very obvious mishmashes of triage evaluations.

However, you’ll notice that on a personal level certain mishmashes are often irrelevant. Thus if YOU decide that friendship is no longer of any value to you and can’t be fought to be saved from your perspective that’s all there is to it really. As far as real outcomes go, your friends thoughts on the matter are largely irrelevant. Each friend has the absolute power to end a friendship at any time whether or not the true state of the friendship is as damaged as they think or not.

Other times a strong mishmash could force a friendship to reach a deeper state of decline. So if one friend thinks a friendship needs like a ton of work and so puts it at the height of their priority, whilst the other friend actually pushed that friendship priority down the scale preferring to focus on other more significant friendships to them that can create a serious conflict that might deeply damage a friendship’s long term survival prospects.  Likely, the friend who doesn’t see the problem as a priority will find the other friend to be annoying and nagging and wish that they would just shut up and go away. At the same time the friend that felt the friendship desperately needed work will feel as if the other friend is ignoring them and just doesn’t care about them or their friendship. This is CERTAINLY an unstable equilibrium that if not resolved will surely quickly lead to the friendship becoming damaged beyond repair.

For this reason I think it’s paramount that people try very hard to learn how to evaluate a friendship’s status in as exact a fashion as possible. That means being objective, being fair, being honest and above all being logical.  This is triage. You have to treat the problem and move on. Life is too short to spend an eternity irrationally dwelling on it and constantly coming to wrong conclusions that muddle everything up.

There are a number of sort of quintessential friendship evaluation traps people suffer that I think are indicative of the way people are not being sufficiently scientific about the whole thing. Let’s explain them one at a time.

The It’s All Cool Trap

This is when someone sort of refuses to see friendship problems at all. They think that any kind of mistake or misjudgment will heal itself on its own in time and that you don’t really need to ever WORK at friendship. Generally people who fall into this trap tend to blame everyone else if any of their friendships fail, but since they never bothered to even send a suffering friendship in for treatment how can they really know what could or couldn’t have been saved?

Friend A: What? All I did was sleep with your girl friend. Don’t go freaking out on me. No worries man. It’ll be cool.

The We DESPERATELY Need to Talk Trap

This is when someone makes every single friendship problem no matter how small as a desperate problem that needs to be treated RIGHT NOW.  Even the slightest argument is a great disaster that must be resolved in order to ensure that the friendship has any chance of continuing.

Friend B: How COULD you? I mean we really need to talk about this! Don’t make light of this. This is serious!
Friend A: Ummm… All I did was borrow your nail clippers. But um, sorry… I guess..

The LIVE! Damn You! Trap

This is when someone is so attached to their friendships that even long dead friendships are sought to be kept at all costs. This is the person pounding on the already dead man’s chest long after they’ve died hoping for a miracle resurrection. And while yeah definitely seeming miracles DO happen sometimes, that person’s time, energy, and emotional distress is almost certainly better spent focused on building and preserving those friendships that CAN be saved. Otherwise you end up going back and forth from near death friendships thinking you can save them at the last minute only to find that they are long sense gone.

Friend B: No! You can’t leave! How could you let it end after all we’ve been through together????

The I’ll Deal With it Later Trap

This is where someone recognizes problems in their friendship but has no ability to distinguish the severity of those problems. Indeed the person always puts friendship problems on a very low priority placing other concerns first. Generally the person always FEELS that they can solve the friendship problems but just doesn’t see the need to do it right at this instant. It can wait to later they think. Always later. Until eventually the friendships are lost anyway.

Friend A: “I know you’re upset about X and want to talk about it and we will I promise, but how about we go get a pizza first?”
Friend B: “Okay sure.”
(2 hours later)
Friend B: “So about that X thing…”
Friend A: “Right right. We’ll talk about it, we will, but you know the game is on right now so how about we put a rain check on it until tomorrow?”
(next day)
Friend A: “Listen, B, I know I said we’d talk about X and I know it’s a big deal so we will but you know I’m really REALLY busy with work these days and it’s eating up all my time and attention. I’m not trying to get away from it and I know it sounds like I’m making excuses but I’m not and I really do want to talk about it.”
Friend B: “It’s okay A. It really wasn’t that big a deal but I DO want to talk about it, but I understand that work is tough these days. We’ll talk about it in a few days.”
(three years later)
Friend B: “So umm, remember how we were supposed to talk about X… and Y…. and Z…. and we never did?”
Friend A: “Geez you sure know how to hold a grudge don’t you!”

The I Aint Gonna Be Nobody’s Chump Trap

This is when someone becomes so averse to friendship resolution or repair that they decide it’s better to let each friendship die then even bother to try to solve it and risk being found to be at blame. This is sort of like the doctor who is afraid of blood or too terrified of making a mistake to engage in surgery. You just hope the friendship goes away and simply value the friendships that last for however long they last.

Friend B: “Don’t you think we should talk about that time we had that argument?”
Friend A: “Nope.”
Friend C: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for X?”
Friend A: *shrug* “Not really.”
Friend D: “Hey man that wasn’t cool at all!”
Friend A: “If you don’t like it, step off!”
Friend E: “If we can’t resolve this then I don’t think we’ll be able to continue to be friends.”
Friend A: “Oh well! Bye!!!”

All of these traps are of course ridiculous extremes that rarely manifest completely in reality. But I think very frequently well meaning people can find themselves starting to fall into one or more of them for periods of time. If for one can identify specific periods of my life when I’ve fallen into the Live! Damn You! Trap and the Nobody’s Chump Traps. I’ve also gone fairly close to falling into the Deal With It Later Trap.

That’s why it’s important to try to take a step back and evaluate the friendship as objectively as you CAN which might be impossible but you can at least try.

When you do this you have to ask yourself certain serious questions. Like what is this friendship worth to you? How much will it hurt to lose this friendship? How much of a drain on your mental well being is keeping this friendship around? Will losing it hurt more or less? What responsibility do you feel toward the person you are friends with to preserve the friendship?  How good a friend IS this friend? How much do they respect you? Do they respect you? Do you respect them? Will they be there for you when times are tough? Or will they abandon you? How trustworthy are they? Are they basically a Good person?  Do you really LIKE this person at all? How much do you want this person to be a part of your life? What do you even want out of this friendship? Is it something you can live without? Is it something you can find easily elsewhere?

And of course the more operational questions. What are the chances of you keeping this friendship even if you try to preserve it now? Do you have the mental or emotional or physical resources to fight to keep this friendship going? Is it worth the fight? What are the chances that the friendship will deteriorate again in the near on long term future? IF it does will those extra years of life be a high quality valuable life worthy of preservation or will it be years of suffering near friendship-death misery or something in-between? Does whatever conflict or division that created the friendship illness require immediate treatment or can it wait? Is it a large scale surgery or can it be bandaged? Will it heal on its own? Or is a deep intervention the only hope?

I don’t imagine that these are in any way EASY questions to answer. They can be pretty insanely hard to answer sometimes. But as much as people don’t always answer these questions openly and explicitly I think they fairly frequently are asking these questions deep down on the inside. I think most friendship conflicts are resolved through a triage decision of some kind.

Because to NOT make a triage decision is ultimately to live in a kind of denial forcing pain and suffering to just linger within you for months and years as no resolution is made. Only fools who are eternal optimists who think that every friendship has a deep and lasting equal inherent value that is always worth fighting for and always can be saved eventually don’t engage in triage. Only idiots like I once was avoid the hard decisions and then pretend that they are better than the decisions themselves because they believe in the rosy view of humanity as somehow inevitably being able to get along and have things work out. Believing that is basically recipe for living perpetually within one or more of the traps I’ve described and being perpetually in pain. You’ll always be trying too hard to save what can’t be saved. You’ll always be hoping against hope that friendships long gone or irreparably damaged will one day be restored to their former glory. And you’ll feel miserable. ALL THE TIME. Every single lost or damaged friendship will feel as a constant drain on your soul. You’ll wrap yourself in cloaks of absurd reasoning to try to prevent the pain from coming back again. Only it will. Again and again and again. And you’ll constantly think the world shouldn’t be this way. You’ll be lost in nostalgia for what could have been but never really was.

Worst of all you’ll always be wishing for everyone to see things at least a little bit more like you do. Really you want them to believe in it as badly as you want to believe in it so that they can make it into a reality along with you. Only nobody really does. Because your way of seeing the world is fundamentally irrational and in spite of how crazy we are, we human beings are all, in the end, actually very rational entities. That’s ESPECIALLY true when it comes to self preservation. And friendship is, ultimately all about one’s social self preservation.

The truth is, Friendships are NOT eternal or magical like they seem to be in stories. They are simply decisions. We make them. We try at them. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we fail EPICALLY and when that happens we have to know when to cut our loses and move on. Other times we can fight and succeed and the friendship can end up stronger for the fight.  But we can’t figure out which is which unless we seriously cut out the mysticism and make rational objective value judgments with regard to our friendships. Doing otherwise is to ultimately shortchange yourself. And that’s just not the way to live a productive happy life.

Of course everything I’ve said thus far with regard to friendship applies equally as much to other kinds of relationships that, when they are at their most healthy anyway, have friendship at their core. Romantic relations and Familial relationships being the most common of those of course.  Of course those types of relationships have a certain level of complexity to them above normal friendship relationships in that they can start off being not friendship relationships at all and the friendship aspect of them can end and still leave something behind that someone might find value in and feel a need to preserve. So for example many a people in familial relationships find it valuable to preserve some kind of suffering cordiality with their family members EVEN when they’ve already decided to terminate their friendship simply because modern social norms make it far more likely that a family member will come to ones aide during times of distress than any other random stranger might. OR because remaining cordial with this family member or members is strictly necessary in order to survive family gatherings that you want to attend simply because there are other family members there that you consider worthy of continuing friendship relationships with them.

And as for romantic relationships, I think you can probably figure out what it is that people find valuable in preserving such relationships even when the friendship portion is no longer a viable entity.

So… that’s pretty much what I’ve learned about freindship over the last 30 years of living. I might be totally wrong but that’s the way I understand things at this juncture in my life. I am no longer willing to live a life devoted to useful fictions and would prefer to try to be rational about matters of friendship. I might not be particularly GOOD at being rational because I am at heart a far too emotional person. But like most things in my life I’ve found that my decisions are better when I allow my reason to take over and live by it.

Now chances are I’ve made some kind of fundamental mistake about the nature of friendship that it’ll take me another ten years to figure out. At which point I’ll blog about my new awesome revelation as if it’s the latest and greatest thing in the world even though to all my readers it will be the most obvious triviality that they figured out when they were ten. But that’s the way this whole blogging thing goes you know? When you try to express your actual thoughts you are constantly risking looking like an idiot or a fool or being hated for it. That’s life you know? It’s kinda a lot like friendship. When you write a blog you take a risk. Your audience triages your work. Is reading this really worthy of my continuing patronage they ask? Is it worth bothering to comment on in hopes of getting the author to improve their content? Or is it better to cut my loses and find some other awesome blog that makes me feel better? And of course the blogger has to triage too. Is being a part of this community worth while for my continued well being or happiness? Or should I cut my losses and go elsewhere? How can I make being a member of this community a more worth while experience?

It’s all the same thing. Life is really about reason as much as anything else. We just really enjoy pretending like it’s not.

Click here to listen to Episode 4 of our podcast. Participants include me (obviously), Jimmy, Kaiti, Andrew, Melissa, and Grace.

This episode was recorded on 08/15/2010.  That’s precisely 84 days ago not including the end date. I would like to take this time to point out that that is LESS than 3 months ago. Now had it taken me 3 months to post this podcast I could understand why the whole world would be outraged and apalled and might feel the urge to form into a lynch mob and come to my house to destroy me. You’d be fully justified in doing so. Only some kind of demonic entity or zombie would withhold such awesomeness from you for three whole months! But luckily it DIDN’T take me 3 months to post this podcast. It was only 84 days. So none of you should have any cause to complain whatsoever.

Besides, the topics discussed herein are timeless.Giraffes are beloved by all. Zombies and Platypodes never go out of style. And Television was never in style to begin with so no worries there.

In truth, I think this was one of the better, though lighter, and funnier episodes of the podcast. If others are interested in getting together to do more episodes, then more episodes will follow. Hopefuilly that will come to pass. With a little energon and a lot of luck many episodes will flow forth like a great river of awesome so that we might all bask in its glory.

DFTBA.