30 January 2009

banish the grand old party!

our new president extended a hand. he did something his predecessor, the douchebag-in-chief, never even offered his own party, much less the folks on the other side of the aisle, and proposed that we work together to try to resolve the economic crisis now plaguing the country. and instead of accepting his hand, the republican members of the house of representatives slapped it away contemptuously.

part of me gets and accepts that there is a certain ideological philosophy that divides our politics, that the other side is opposed to big government, while my side doesn't really feel that way. there's the side that promotes laissez-faire economics, politics, personal responsibility, healthcare, and education. and then there's my side that recognizes how great a theory laissez faire is. but like other great political idea(l)s (e.g no child left behind and communisim), in practice, they are both unattainable and quite simply, idealisticly retarded.

it was that grand laissez faire economic theory that got us into this mess, and while economic watchdog groups warned (e.g. in 1998 when brooksley born of the commodity futures trading commission tried to issue regulatory schemes into the derivatives business) that the fit would certainly hit the shan if we did not pay close attention to the over-leveraging of these shaky investment scams, the shitstorm went awry. and then when the foreclosures began and people like barney frank (democrat, massachusetts) were sending smoke signals to a treasury and congress unwilling to budge from free market ideology, bear stearns and lehman brothers (some of the best trusted brands in the money world (who probably would've held a majority of those retirement funds our dumb-ass former president wanted to privatize last year)) went belly up. and then, to add insult to injury, hank paulson dumped $350 million taxpayer bailout funds into banks to infuse capital and beef up lending, but when he didn't bother to pay attention to what they were actually going to do with the money, the banks went to try to buy private jets and to help issue $14 billion worth of bonuses to the ship sinkers while the rest of america moved and continues to move steadily toward bankruptcy.

yes, what a great fucking job the free market has done to ensure the stability and success of the american economy.

my point is simply that the gop's grand small-government philosophy looks great on paper, sounds awesome in economic theory classes, and much like karl marx's manifesto, makes the idealist in all of us go gooey in the knees. but in practicality, it has failed so miserably that we are all left wondering if we'll have a job tomorrow, if we'll have a roof over our head next week, or a dollar to our name next month.

those guys fucked up, and their impractical ideals fucked us on the way. so they need to get the hell out of our way so we can try to clean up the mess our way.

i do fear that these gop madmen have no ears, and that should they ignore the will of the people, they will scream on their way to a barren mantua, as romeo once did,

"ha, banishment: be merciful, say 'death';
for exile hath more terror in his look,
much more than death: do not say 'banishment'."

~k

2 comments:

  1. Agreed, death is far more merciful than exile.

    This hearkens me back to my visit to Cuba. Point in case of an idealogy that should have stayed just that, a wonderful sociopolitical THEORY.

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  2. I tried to argue this very point with a guy. No matter how many examples or counterpoints I could provide him, he refused to even see a middle ground. The problem with disagreements with ideologues is the lack of a central agreement. You cannot even budge someone if you cannot stand together on at least one idea. Otherwise, you have nothing to build from.

    I actually learned this separation of theory from practicality when I was a couple of years out of college. I was working at a dotcom and we were changing the machines we hosted our customers on and I had to write scripts to automatically move them all over. I would start the transfer on one machine which over 100 customers, but somewhere along the line random customers would fail during the transfer. I couldn't figure it out and it wasn't repeatable, nothing seemed wrong with what I was doing. A coworker suggested that if I detected a failure that I should just blindly try the transfer again. This was so alien to me, because in my world I needed to figure out why it was failing and fix it. Then he pointed out that shit happens. Sometimes the network just hiccups. I had a Shakabuku. So, I did it, I just added a blind retry upon failure and all the problems disappeared (or were glossed over). It is one of those silly moments that changes your whole perspective, because after that I realized that theory and perfectly controlled scenarios are nice and all, but the real world doesn't work that way in computer or politics or relationships, etc.

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