Muse – Political Randomness

Improving US Politics

One thing I like about the British political system as it currently stands in a little tidbit called Prime Minster’s Questions. In it the current Prime Minister has a general question and answer session with members of Parliament. It’s interesting to hear them bantering back and forth and the other members expressing their agreement or not with various questions and answers tossed back and forth. I catch it sometimes on Cspan and I think that the US political system could do with something like this.

We need President’s Questions, a less formal atmosphere in which our members of congress can show their usefulness by posing questions for the President and have it covered on Cspan at least, if not all major stations. Since it’s not every day, I’m sure that they could squeeze it into their schedules. We Americans have far too many scripted speeches and addresses from our president and not enough impromptu events like this.

Election Cycle Strawmen

Listening to a Bush event on Cspan on the way to work one day, I constantly find myself shaking my head. He builds and swats down so many obvious strawmen, I’m constantly shaking my head. Kerry does the same, but I think Bush does it more. Ever ready to paint ‘terrorism’ with a monolithic brush when the subject should be carefully dissected with a scalpel. Always presenting the black and white ‘fight terrorists’ or ‘take it up the ass from terrorists’ arguments when dealing with terrorism is a more complex beast than that.

The entirety of the man’s platform is anti-intellectual from the dumbed down black and white foundation of it. It makes the most complex word issues seem like a simple yes or no answer. Which is, for the most part, against everything for which I stand as I’m never one to look at complex issues in so simple a set of terms, which border on negligence. Yet another reason he’ll never get my vote.

More on Collective Living

So I really have no idea what you mean by “better”, since it won’t deliver us what we need and want as well as the current system, and since it requires us to entirely change human nature and totally reform all of society to do it. Even ignoring the fact that forcibly altering human nature is damn near impossible (not to mention highly immoral), why would it benefit us to shrug off our natural instincts and desires, which have motivated us to survive for millions of years, just to fit into your particular vision of utopia?

What I mean by better is that such a society would be focused more on the betterment of itself. In a society like this(note: as I envision it and have used it as a scenario before), all children would be educated, all people would be employed and all would receive their fare share of the fruits of communal labor, leaving none without the necessities of life and the pleasures that make life worth living. That’s why I consider it better.

Note, I’ve not said a thing about forcing anyone to live in such a society(you should know I would never seek to force such things on people, even if I think it was for their own good – I’ve been raised on stories of the fallacy in such benevolent domination) and have already acknowledged twice that human nature in general precludes the existence of such a society on anything but the smallest of levels. When it comes to our natural instincts, I think they’re changing all the time. One need only look to where we’ve progressed thus far. I think that we will get there eventually. But just like all projects in natural social engineering, it takes decades if not centuries to start showing real change.

I only lament that I’ll not see such things in my time.