Seth's World

You wanna talk politics.  I know you do, or at least some of you do.  Let’s do it.  I think the Republican party is bullshit because it is a party necessarily divided.  You can’t have government uninvolvement and anti-abortion, gay marriage and all that shit.  You know why?  You can’t have it because the moral shift has already happened.  Taking the government intervention out of the private life turns reality socially liberal on you.  My opinion.  Religion is bunk and there’s a whole Christian Coalition behind that making the right look stupid.  When the Republicans want to reorganize and work toward a more efficient smaller government that relies on the integrity of arms bearing citizens without all the moral uppitiness, I’ll certainly take a closer look.  But until then, every vote will be Non-Republican unless there is a serious ethical issue with one of my Dems.

My Dems are starting to acknowledge atheists.  They understand that there are areas that require government involvement and regulation.  But there is a limit to regulation and I could use some good Repubs to choose from.  I might even believe there was a God if I saw some.  That’s not actually true, by the way.

Look, I’ve even provided a comments section.  Feel free to use it.  But do use a little respect.  Some name calling is okay and even entertaining but ultimately I hope dissent can be informative.

The goal of justice is to punish the guilty and reward the hard working.  The goal of love is to reward commitment and punish the myopically self centered people who use and discard others taking advantage of emotional attachment.  The quest to understand reality hopes to reward us with further technology and understanding of human nature because the punishment of ignorance already exists; we can’t seem to break our cycles.  At least, this is how I feel at present and I intend to type a few more paragraphs connecting my thoughts.

The relationship between justice, love, and reality is that each of these things has an intrinsic value.  Justice is desirable.  Love provides the cornerstone for all nurturing, altruistic actions.  Reality and the rules that govern it are the restrictions placed upon us that we want to learn about so that we get the fairest possible opportunity to live and perpetuate, to persist in some way.  Perhaps love would be the desired input.  Reality would be the calculator, and justice would appear in the digital display like a good calculation and we could repeat for each person like so much of a math problem and acheive perfect and fair results.

The problem is with the unknowables and how those unknowns are taken into account.  In the context of justice, laws and procedures are created in an effort to ensure that the guilty get punished and the innocent are set free.  However, we cannot know from the outset of a case what the right answer is, so we can’t direct our efforts toward the most expedient way to achieve the correct answer.  So the guilty walk and the innocent serve jailtime and we call this justice.  In the context of love, the idea itself is horribly misunderstood.  Teenagers understand it as a feel good notion of solidarity, maybe obsession, maybe orgasm induced.  Children understand it as safety or being important to someone.  Adults have different ways of nurturing.  Some sparing the rod without spoiling the child and some parents having their beat and breaking kids too.  It’s called love often enough when it isn’t so where do we trust our vulnerability and invest our energy?  In the context of reality, we scour the data and make sense of the patterns in the hope of revealing the correct conclusions but with no way to tell if the next theory is the last answer or just the next one.  If you remember your trigonometry, you’ll probably recall that it is possible to mistake a local minimum or maximum for the minimum or maximum of a function if you don’t look past the diminishing returns to the actual trend of the function.  And if you don’t zoom right in the graph, you might never even notice.

Justice is built on rules so it is predictable and then the rules take a life of their own.  Politicians are designed to represent us but then they turn career criminals stealing even their time in office for what?  More time.  Alimony becomes a sword, and female becomes a shield.  Black gets overlooked because adults say everyone is equal and kids don’t get to understand why some people obviously look totally different.  So the system defeates itself.  The politicians aren’t the people.  The punishment is the crime.  And racism gets to grow because discussing it sensibly is offensive.  These are just three places justice is failing.

Love is based on hope so it’s aspirational.  But we want dedication and consistancy from others while being allowed to grow.  We often respect differences with silence and accept what we cannot change with a beer.  The system can defeat itself as relationships perpetuate themselves long after the love is gone.  The punishment is the cognizant dissonance between the act of love and the facade of a relationship.  The failings don’t get discussed because using reason on emotion is just offensive.

Reality is based on repeatability.  But we shortcut that by isolation and specialization.  What is real to someone may not even translate if we don’t speak a common language, can we really compare notes?  The punishment is the continued haze between our senses and the indisputable physics of the situation.  We don’t get to know what moves make the most difference.  We don’t even get to know which goals can even be achieved.  We have TVs, an expired space shuttle, cancer, and Scientology.  In my humble opinion, half of these items would disappear if we had reality understood correctly.

We can’t make facts suddenly appear.  We can neither make people love us nor can we ensure they will continue to do so.  We can’t guarantee justice of the all-knowing kind.  I think what’s next is that we embrace the unknown and realize that what’s left is justice, love, and reality of the procedural kind, where justice is considered just because the actions leading to the ruling are deemed so in spite of the fact that we cannot know the truth, where love is a verb that one person acts upon and another person receives the benefits of, where reality is the best guess complete with plans to improve.  There could be a God with all the answers looking down who could tell us the answer.  But I’d never believe it because we aren’t gods, our senses are fragile, our justice is flawed, we can’t even count on our love… except where we can when we’re engineering new technology, where we realize the randomness by which we are born into first world or third world circumstance, and where the people who love you don’t shape the warm blanket of their affection like a noose.

As always, thanks for reading.

As I absorb my morning caffeine, I will lay some more of my thoughts at the feet of the Internet.

As an American, I live in a two party world:  Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians.  Yeah, I know that seems like there are three parties, but in the legislature, we have Republicans, Democrats, or Independents.  There aren’t many Independents.  Two exist in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives.  So this is important to this post: there are only two parties in any real sense at present.

As an American, I live in a real world.  It has nuances and re-ordered priorities.  Most of the believers I know aren’t anywhere close to the fundamentalists that scare me.   Democrats and Republicans get modifiers like “moderate” when they stray close to the middle to show that they too are nuanced even though they must wear the colors of one party or the other and all that comes with that.

As an American, I get fed news from news sources and that’s pretty much how I get most of my information.  I can’t be everywhere at once and I don’t have reporters seated at my beck and call so I can get the scoop on the information I really care about.  So I can’t really tell if the healthcare debate is being overblown or not.  I’m not in touch with enough ordinary people to feel like my sample size is representative for even Virginia.  So my ability to “see the world” is a bit limited at present.

Government is a tough and complicated job.  Law is a tough and complicated rule-set.  It’s tough to find the balance between good ideas such as “Let’s give everybody their best chance to be somebody” and “Let’s ensure that the talented people can use their talents”.  Because we want to compete on a global level and against nature, but we don’t want to pay an unnecessary price by killing off our more fragile neighbors.  Some of us want animals protected and land.  Some of us want more resources so we can outscore our opponents economically.  These are all good things but they end up opposing each other sometimes.

Quit with the reflexive reactions.  That’s all I’m asking.  The news might not cover you and I might never know you’re out there being more thoughtful than I can imagine.  If you’re a Republican and the right move is to extend more privileges to society in general while growing government, do it.  Just in this case though.  Next issue reset and think that through and find the best answer to that.  And Democrats, don’t overlook the needs behind the gun carrying concerns.  And for the nonexistent (or existent if you believe) God’s sake, optimize the Goddamned government.  If you’ve got bureaus that don’t perform, fix it.  If you, the government,  for one second think you can fix the American people by changing the rules and throwing offenders in jail while simultaneously thinking the government can grow and grow and grow without challenge, I’ll teach you something along with all the other normal people the news never shows.

I don’t see why complicated subjects can’t be chopped into bite size pieces.  I don’t see why healthcare has to be a big bill when smaller bills would allow the public to oversee their government’s thinking a little better.  I don’t see why American government doesn’t spend the first days in office agreeing on a fucking National strategy for the next 2, 4, and 12 years and then try to accomplish that.  When you fail, say you failed, find out why and let the next set of leaders do better.  America could be a well oiled machine.

If you want to write me in for office, my name is Seth Strong.  The only thing I want to do if I’m representing real people is look at the efficiency and the goals of federal agencies and optimize the shit out of that.  Imagine if the same amount of taxes accomplished more.  I’m a software engineer, so I understand bugs and tough problems.  But I also know the value of planning and executing the plan day after day even when the solution seems so far away until one day it all comes together.

Tilting at windmills is outdated and tilting at wind turbines is counter-productive.  It’d be better to hit my head against the rock of immutable change that is our government and our news delivery system.  Let me know if you’re a reasonable person.  Let me know what your issues and concerns are.  What is going on in real people’s heads?  Comment please.  These big problems aren’t so tough that we can’t make improvements.  Are you in?