This year I've already got a plot idea - a quirky take on an alien invasion - so in that regards I'm ready to roll.
What's different this year is that I'm volunteering to serve as a Municipal Liaison (ML) for the Florida: Elsewhere region (Polk County despite it being the 5th largest metro population in the state doesn't have its own Region). This brings with it some responsibilities.
I have to organize and host various Write-Ins in the area (getting those organized as we speak for local city libraries and writers' groups). I have to manage a calendar (although this might conflict with other MLs in other parts of Florida: Elsewhere, as it's a catch-all for a lot of places that are hours apart).
There's several other things I'll need to do during November, but with luck/skill/mostly luck we'll have a solid turnout of NaNo-ing among the writers of Central Florida. Expect a wave of self-published ebooks out of Lakeland by the end of February!
Get NaNo-ing people. Well, also get the damn vote out, but if I can juggle between those priorities you can too!
My home computer cannot connect to any monitor or digital TV I try to plug in.
The Graphics Card may have quit in protest.
I have no choice now but to work from my laptop until further notice.
This also means I need to generate more money to pay for any repairs to the desktop.
Consider this my BUY MY EBOOKS post for the week.
Hero Cleanup Protocol - via Smashwords.com, although Nook and iBooks readers can access them through the regular retailer websites.
My author's page at Amazon.com - links to my personal anthology Last of the Grapefruit Wars and to the humor-horror anthology Strangely Funny (please also leave reviews if you purchase the titles, thanks)!
I'm working on finishing up a story or two before NaNoWriMo kicks in this November.
What can I say? I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears.
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
Losers: Rick Scott. Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then. Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus). Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott. In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
One thing about managing a blog site is, you know, getting feedback on what you write.
I suffer a bit (okay, a LOT) from writer's block, and part of the reason for that is that when I do write something and publish it... I get little back in the way of commentary, critiques, etc.
I know criticism itself isn't fun to endure - you make something, and hope that everyone likes it - but this is a political blog. I know there are other people's opinions. And there is a chance - yes, I admit to it, I am human ergo I am flawed - that I may be wrong, and it takes someone else pointing out and arguing with better-cited facts where I may be a tad off.
The only criticism I don't cater is that of the Troll: the ones who show up to crow or taunt or mock without fact or reason. The "HAHA youre librul you suck" type. The "You Morans" type of comment. Which is why I placed a Moderator system to the Comments section to this blog to filter out the non-serious stuff. (I also got a ton of Chinese spam on my literary blog, which is a different story altogether. How the hell did China find my Book With The Blue Cover site anyway?)
The Comment section should allow for people with Google or OpenID or Yahoo accounts to post comments. I thought I left an option for any non-account people as well, but I may be seeing a different screen than non-users (since I'm doing this through Google account already).
If it doesn't allow for non-accounts, please let me know. I gots Twitter, find me @PaulWartenberg or use my email p.warten AT gmail.com. If not, you can usually find me on TNC's threads over at the Atlantic blogs. Also: If people don't like having the comments moderated, again please let me know. I'm just not too keen on the wrong kind of traffic, okay?
But please, if you can, Post Comments! I wanna hear back from the seven of youse.
I need to mention this to you, bro: posting as Anonymous puts you down amongst the spammer heathens. Put your name to your comments or not at all.
And so, in honor of my older brother finding my political blog, this one goes out to you.
What I Hate About Libertarianism. (NOTE: This was edited the following day for some misspells and grammar, and for additional points to be made. Carry on.).
Primarily: it's an -Ism. With that, I'm on the side of Ferris Bueller:
Isms in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon: "I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me." Good point there. After all, he was the Walrus. I could be the Walrus. I'd still have to bum rides off of people.
The point being, any -Ism is at face value a risky thing. It's a creed or ideology that requires you to accept its tenets wholeheartedly as absolutes, and views any variation or deviation from those tenets as heresy. And the problem with thinking in absolutes is that not everything fits those absolutes: there are always exceptions, anomalies, people or events that don't fit easily into the hypotheses, axioms and theories that make up an Ism.
There are a slew of Isms in the political ideology spectrum. Liberalism and Conservatism, obviously. Socialism and Communism and Capitalism covering the economic aspects. Variations of religious theocracy. Hell, there's a whole list of Isms in philosophy.
So why does libertarianism get special mention as an Ism I hate?
Because somehow in this nation, there's this whole fetish in the mainstream media of viewing libertarianism as a viable alternative to the existing dominant Isms of conservatism and liberalism. Even though libertarianism hasn't really been fully tested and proven to work - and that the elements of libertarianism (applied by conservatives who simply love the anti-government tenets that underscore libertarianism... and ignore the rest) that have been tried haven't exactly impressed.
Other issues I have with libertarianism is that its obsession with personal liberty and reduction of government bureaucracy end up with the same equation of getting rid of government regulations and laws that were put in place to protect individuals and families in the first place. David Frum, writing about why he figured out that maybe just maybe a welfare state had its reasons for existing, quoted G.K. Chesterton (some snippage for flow of reading):
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that we should never tear down a fence until we knew why it had been built. In the calamity after 2008, we rediscovered why the fences of the old social insurance state had been built... Speaking only personally, I cannot take seriously the idea that the worst thing that has happened in the past three years is that government got bigger. Or that money was borrowed. Or that the number of people on food stamps and unemployment insurance and Medicaid increased. The worst thing was that tens of millions of Americans – and not only Americans – were plunged into unemployment, foreclosure, poverty. If food stamps and unemployment insurance, and Medicaid mitigated those disasters, then two cheers for food stamps, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid... Which does not mean that I have become suddenly indifferent to the growth of government. Not at all... Yet that same conservative sensibility is also properly distrustful of the fantasy that society can be remade according to a preconceived plan...
Frum writes earlier in that essay about how he viewed his once-hardline stance on what he thought was his conservative-libertarianism: that there would be trade-offs between liberty and social safety, and that the people making the decisions would have some honor in what they did:
Some of the terms of that trade were honored. From 1983 through 2008, the US enjoyed a quarter-century of economic expansion, punctuated by only two relatively mild recessions. In the late 1980s, the country was hit by the savings & loan crisis, the worst financial crisis to that point since the 1930s – and although the S&L crisis did deliver a blow, the country rapidly recovered and came up smiling. New industries were born, new jobs created on an epic scale, incomes did improve, and the urban poor were drawn into the working economy... But of course, other terms of the trade were not honored... Especially after 2000, incomes did not much improve for middle-class Americans. The promise of macroeconomic stability proved a mirage: America and the world were hit in 2008 by the sharpest and widest financial crisis since the 1930s. Conservatives do not like to hear it, but the crisis originated in the malfunctioning of an under-regulated financial sector, not in government overspending or government over-generosity to less affluent homebuyers. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bad actors, yes, but they could not have capsized the world economy by themselves. It took Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and — maybe above all — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s to do that.
Frum's article, and other articles he'd written over the past few years, highlight a person who's spent long hours thinking and writing his political beliefs into a coherent philosophy... only to find that the absolutes he counted on fell apart once the complexities and harshness of the real world intervened.
Earlier I wrote about how libertarianism's focus on gutting regulations and laws was a reason I'm not a fan of this Ism. That's because as a student of history I can recall eras of human history where we didn't have many rules or regulations that protected workers and consumers and other individuals from harm. Has no one read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair? Anyone ever read up the reasons why Teddy Roosevelt went after the trusts? Can I just point out that this is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?
Regulations exist for a reason: TO PROTECT PEOPLE. To make sure that the innocent are not harmed or made sick or forced to work to death or driven into poverty because of other people's greed and mismanagement of our markets. There's a reason these fences were built, and libertarians don't seem to notice or care. Because their Ism insists that personal freedom supersedes the community's need for safety and common service.
Without government regulations we'd have airplanes crashing every other week instead of every other year. Without government regulations we'd have salmonella in all the food, just not from a peanut corporation with a horrible health record. Without OSHA we'd have more workplace accidents and deaths.
For all the hassles and complaints about the costs of regulations and the costs of fines and the costs of this and that, they pale in comparison to the costs of businesses destroying themselves by poisoning their customers or burning down their buildings and killing their workers. People seem to forget that 100 years ago your can of meat had a 50/50 chance of killing you, either because the meat was toxic or the label wrapping the can was toxic. Or that the can itself would probably explode. We live in a safer world today... and people forget that it's due to those regulations put in place before we were born. (EDIT: I'd like to add how the libertarian free-market crowd believes that Regulation can be replaced by "Enlightened Self-Interest". I'd also like to highlight that Enlightened Self-Interest means nothing compared to Greed when most of our economic overlords had a choice between either).
I think my rant started at one point, and dove toward another, but both of them cover the same issue at hand: Why I Hate Libertarianism. And I'd like to get back to my earlier argument about how the Ism aspect of libertarianism is that it's an ideology that deals in absolutes. Because my final argument against libertarianism is how it insists that its vision of the world could create a better cleaner happier loving world. In short, libertarians are what I call Utopians (Utopianists is apparently not a word).
I studied literary utopias in my freshman year at University of Florida back in 1988. It was a bit of an eye-opener. Not only covering More's Utopia (the Trope Namer as it were), the class also covered Butler's Erewhon, Bellamy's Looking Backward (a forgotten text today but a major bestseller in the 19th Century: it was so prevalent that its critics wrote "sequels" denouncing the original's themes), and one other that I can't recall (although Bacon's New Atlantis seems familiar). And the one thing I took from the class was: Utopias don't work.
Each Utopia I read about highlighted the writer's already-established biases about human behavior and what could be changed or fixed to make humanity "improve". But as the professor noted with all the "response" books that sprung up after each Utopian novel, each of those Utopian writers would either ignore a human trait - Greed, Arrogance, Ignorance, Ineptitude, Fear, Lust, Wrath, etc. - or underplay how damaging those traits could derail a society. Usually on the hand-wave premise that "well, it will work because people will WANT it to work." Even the "response" books to Looking Backward tried to create their own visions of utopia to counter Bellamy's vision... and those critics created flawed worlds as well.
And it wasn't just novels: the class also examined real-life attempts at creating Utopian communities here in the United States. Places like New Harmony. There was Oneida (yes, the silverware guys). You might have heard of Fruitlands: it's the one founded (and failed) under the leadership of Louisa May Alcott's father. It's why Alcott wrote and published Little Women and its sequels, to regain the family's finances. A lot of these Utopian communities failed because their founders believed they could overcome certain human traits... and couldn't. The attempts at real-life Utopias either fell apart because of the fatal flaw their founders overlooked and wouldn't confront... or because they changed their rules - like the Mormons, for the most part - in order to continue existing.
And so every time I look at Libertarianism - and as much as I see in Communism and Socialism and Liberalism and Conservatism and a ton of other Isms - I see a Utopian ideology, one that's obsessed with its Absolute view of perfecting society that can't really ever be perfected, refusing to compromise on either the big issues or the little details... and expecting to receive adulation and acceptance all because of its' purity of vision.
Even Pragmatism has its flaws. Yeah. Dude. I went there. Deal with it.
I expect a retort from my brother whenever he finds the time. And this time, bro, put your name to it.
Other than the fact that my librarian background simply doesn't fit in too well with about 78 percent of the job market...
What bothers me is that *I* have to go to the employers for their job openings. Offering my resume, typing in application forms, begging for interviews. The problem is, each employer has their own requirements/requests for resumes... and different means of typing in application forms. It gets frustrating that I gotta waste an hour or two tweaking each resume submission, or typing in a brand new application form.
Why can't we reverse the process? Have all job search engines work the other way? Have the human resources department come looking for US, based on our one standardized resume, no applications to fill, just come to us and take a quick look and see if we pass the preliminary before calling us for an interview?
I mean, THEY know what they're looking for. The HR people can spot and keyword search within reason, and narrow the searches down and get us on the phone pronto. Why have 100,000 unqualified people overwhelm a Human Resources office with half-assed resumes for one job, when the HR people can search a resume database, whittle it down to 5-10 people they like, and go from there?
Better still, at job fairs, sit the unemployed people down at a table, have our resumes displayed in front of us, and have the HR people walk by us and window-shop, pointing out "How much for that librarian in the window?" before taking us home for work and feeding?
Sigh. It's been two years plus doing this. We need a change of employment methods. This current method, it just ain't working for me and 17 million other people...
"If we want to be serious about reducing the deficits and reducing our debt, we NEED to look at how our government gets its revenues."
"We need to raise the taxes on those who can afford it: the millionaires and billionaires who still profited during these last three years of hardship while the middle class struggled to stay out of poverty. Not to raise such taxes as a putative measure, but to ensure that every American is paying their fair share into fixing our financial problems."
"We need to begin closing tax loopholes for corporations. Especially any tax loophole that benefits too few companies at the expense of the nation. And especially any loophole that does not hamper or prevent corporations from generating honest profit."
"Also, you all should really buy a copy of Paul Wartenberg's ebook. He needs the moneys. And some of the stories in that collection are pretty funny. Word."
"Also, I strongly suggest that every American hugs a puppy or kitten today. If you're allergic, perhaps a Pokemon action figure."
"One last thing. I wasn't born in Hawaii. I was born on the planet Krypton, sent here by my true father Marlon Brando to... wait, I already did this joke, didn't I?"
This year I've already got a plot idea - a quirky take on an alien invasion - so in that regards I'm ready to roll.
