| Notes | Book |
It's quite appropriate that the US elections come shortly after Halloween. We have a massive training exercise for the Junior Extortionists League (trick or treaters) followed by a massive display of graft and corruption by the Senior Extortionists League (politicians).
There are those who say that is doesn't make much difference whether Bush or Kerry wins.
It may be true that both US political parties live in a statist bubble that has little to do with the real universe. Perhaps when viewed from the distance of a real universe perspective, the policies of both parties are moving at warp speed toward a collision with unpleasant reality.
If you start from the center of the galaxy, and your course deviates by only a tenth of a degree, you can be light years off when you reach the edge of the galaxy.
The bigger and more powerful the empire, the more even slight differences in the personalities and policies of the emperor can make a huge difference in the lives of the common people who live on the outer edge of the political system.
All politicians and their supporters are liars and thieves to one degree or another, and Bush and Kerry are not exceptions. In this case we have two men who are telling lies that are very similar, especially on the subject of the Iraq War. But what liars say means little. We should instead look to the history of these two individuals, and to the ideology of their supporters.
As usual, we have the choice between a fascist and a communist ideology. The parties are divided on details and how to divide the loot, but the common goal of expanding the state is the overriding objective of both.
So the small policy differences between the two parties are much the same as they have been for the last several elections, but the personalities of the candidates change with every new contest.
It is ironic that Bush, supposedly the representative of the rich and sophisticated, can scarcely string together three sentences without some kind of major grammatical or logical error. Kerry, who claims to represent the less fortunate, is adept at spinning out reams of complex sentences that are totally incomprehensible to his constituency but have at least a superficial logical consistency. No statist is capable of truly consistent logic in the political realm, because the basis of statism is hypocrisy. “All men are created equal” went by the by when the constitution was written.
One might expect the person who gets his support from the American Elite to be a pragmatist, not a dogmatic Christian. And it is counterintuitive that Kerry should be the one who believes that science should take priority in matters of public policy. Of course there always seems to be enough irony in politics to sink a battleship, and Imperial Washington produces way more than its share.
Some might worry that we are only arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Perhaps we haven't progressed that far. Are we arguing about whether we need to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, while we ignore the icebergs of the financial, ecological, and military catastrophes that threaten our nation and our world?