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I don’t think this election is going to end well, and that things will come to a head within the next five to ten years. What I’m seeing during this post-election cycle full of lawsuits, accusations, allegations, press conferences, and twitter spats are two competing narratives, hurt feelings, and a ton of hypocrisy.
In terms of the election, I think that there was some voter fraud. Every election has that, and this election is no different. The people arguing that this was an election completely devoid of corruption, fraud, and irregularity are engaged in wishful thinking. And the idea from the other side there are some who are claiming that the entire vote was fraudulent, that millions of votes have been created and that the will of the people so on and so forth. Both sides make me weary.
Bill Barr came out and said that there was no evidence so far of widespread voter fraud that would have influenced the outcome of an election. Barr has been relatively mild in comparison to Trump and others on the conservative side, and often redirects back to the Constitution and the law and I respect him for that. We have forgotten that our government was designed to have separate functions with checks and balances that were supposed to help keep everyone in line and in accordance to the Constitution. Today, we are wanting the President and Justices to be legislators and for the legislators to be merely accountants and yes men.
We’ve lived for generations away from an autocrat and away from the systems of government that had pervaded the world in which the few had the power and all of the rights, and the many just lived to serve the few. And unfortunately it looks as though we are going to be heading back toward the historical norm.
I personally don’t think that the vote was rife with millions of fraudulent votes. Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe, but not to the scope that people are arguing. I was wary of universal mail in voting, and I still think that it is very unrefined, way under secured, and still way too susceptible to fraud. We rushed out these methods in the middle of a pandemic while we were scrambling to make heads or tails of this virus, and the outcome with all the lawsuits reflects that. Is it something that should be completely abolished, no. But is it something to be intensely scrutinized and reformed, absolutely.
Me personally, I am still a Libertarian living in the deep blue state of California, a nearly one-party state with delusions of the humanist utopia that will never appear. The party that wants to save the world from humanity can’t take care of themselves. The movement that preaches helping others can’t help themselves. Activism means screaming at people you disagree with, and the doing should be done by someone else. My personal philosophy and beliefs will be shared with people willing to listen to them, and maybe I’ll open someone to the possibility of changing their mind, but I doubt it. The tribalism is too deep for many.
This post isn’t directed at any one thing, it is more a rant today. I, like many in this country are tired: of Covid, of the bickering, of the lockdowns, of the death, of the politics, of people, of so much. I want cooler heads to prevail, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon, and I think it will get worse before it gets better. I am dismayed at the types of rhetoric being bandied about so cavalierly in the media about lists, and enemies, and reprogramming. That to me is the language of fascism, and the one’s spouting it either don’t believe it and are saying it for brownie points on the internet, or they believe it but don’t see how it is fascistic, or at its worst, they do believe it and are willing to be fascists to get power.
I try to follow Hanlon’s razor for these things, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” And I think that there is a lot of stupidity in our discourse today. The downside of the internet is that we’ve gained a notion that we’re much smarter than we actually are, because we can find something to back up whatever we can say. This creates a world in which everyone is factually correct but not right, and it often justifies short sighted positions with little to no attention paid to long term consequences.
We’ll see what shakes out. Personally I think we’re at the start of a new dark age, right as the Roman Empire is collapsing. For all the scientific facts we have, we are as dependent as ever on our feelings, using my version of reality to dictate to others how they should view their. We’ve become detached from the objective, and are focused on how everything makes us feel. We are rewriting our history not from an objective standpoint, but against the reflection and judgment of our modern day beliefs in order to poison the things with even a modicum of positive impact on the world.
Our government wasn’t meant to function with people who couldn’t understand what liberty meant, and we’re seeing that play out today. Those who preach “tolerance,” are the ones who can’t seem to tolerate those who disagree with them. Those who have dominated the space believe that you bear the responsibility for collective sin, but not personal action. Those who want to shape our society in accordance to their belief of victimhood don’t want reconciliation and forgiveness, but the power of the very oppressor they claim to be victims of so they can inflict new oppression to replace the old. It is a cycle with no end.
And here I sit, a novice of history, an outsider with little influence to shape events, speaking into the wilderness that is the internet, hoping that my voice makes a difference. But the alternative in my mind is worse. Doing nothing. Evil triumphs when good men do nothing, so they say. I’m not a “good man.” I try to be, but I am imperfect, with my own problems and issues. But I aspire to be. So I do what I can. And this is something I can do.
A Place 4Politics 