The Good: Steve really comes into his own here as a leader, even when little is to be gained by it. If there’s something I love about this series, it is its unflagging insistence that no one is disposable. Every bit of struggle against the common enemy is necessary. Every bit of betrayal is wrong. I just about applauded when one of the scientists suggests — from a very sound strategic basis — that they have to burn the infection out, and if it kills Will Byers, then he has to die. And Paul Reiser’s character just fixes him with a stare and says “Say that again.” I was almost expecting the Dr. to show his true, evil colors here. That he did not made me love the series even more.
The only reason anyone in this series is disposable is because they choose to be: to take the side of the evil for their own selfish reasons. Dustin comes perilously close to that, far closer than I think he realizes, by placing Dart’s welfare and his wish to impress Max at a higher level than the welfare of his friends. And Max, I think, sees this, and is quite understandably more attracted to Lucas, who took the chance to tell her the truth, regardless of how stupid it sounded. That Dustin tried to make these two violations of “Law” equivalent, shows that he really doesn’t understand at all.
Also, we finally see Will’s fear realized. Yes, the Thing inside him can spy through him and can compel him, although I really like that it can’t just access his memories, and it doesn’t really seem to have a handle on human behavior.
The Bad: While on some level the Thing would be able to spy through Will, it was awfully predictable that this would happen, and the betrayal is incredibly reminiscent of the fight on C-level in Aliens when most of the Colonial Marines get their faces eaten. If this was intended as homage, it really came off as unimaginative. It’s maddeningly unclear how vulnerable the Demodogs are to gunfire, and it feels very much like they are killed only at the speed of Plot.
Further Questions: Are they all going to die? And where is El??
Uncategorized
Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 3 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Etc.)
The Good: Sigh. This episode, I thought, was about the weakest we’ve seen yet. The only good thing I can find to say about it is that it’s cool that Mom’s Boyfriend, Bob (played by Sean Astin) is actually an okay guy trying to do his best to be something resembling a father figure to his girlfriend’s obviously troubled son. Generally, this is what I like best about the series: I’ve always been a sucker for the ‘Okay, but what would it REALLY be like to be an ordinary person living through this bizarre plot’ stories.
The Bad: Except. Oh, except. This episode is pretty much a classic Idiot Plot. “Look, I found this mysterious thing in the trash like no other creature I’ve ever seen! A year after we did battle with a mysterious creature from The Dimension Of Eeeevils! I’m sure it’s just an undiscovered, COMPLETELY NORMAL species! Which I will now protect and lie to my friends about!” Aaargh. I mean, yes part of this is understandable because Dustin is about 12 and stupid (but I repeat myself) but really?
Further Questions: The only one is when (not if) keeping Dart will turn out to be a Big Mistake. Oh, and of course what has really happened to Will Byers when the Thing In The Visions grabs him?
Words: Stranger Things (Lots Of Spoilers), Part II
So, yesterday, I talked a lot about why I liked Stranger Things. Now we come to some of my criticisms of the show. None of these spoiled my enjoyment of the show as such, but here we go:
Minor Idiot Plots: So I have to modify what I said earlier. There are a few minor instances of the Idiot Plot. The subvariant, in this case, is People Don’t Tell Each Other They Know Things: Jonathan doesn’t tell Mom he’s figured out that she’s seeing and hearing real things, and when Nancy very reasonably asks if they shouldn’t tell her, says something like, “No, she’s been through enough.” Well, yes, and a very large part of all she’s been through is nobody believing her. It should be obvious to anyone that telling Joyce she’s not crazy is the best thing you could do for the poor woman.
Toxic Atmosphere: This is one of those writing moments that truly baffles me, because there was absolutely no reason for it. When Hopper and Joyce are prepared for their trip into the Upside Down, Evil Dr. Brenner tells them the atmosphere is toxic. Um, no. Will has survived there for something like three or four days. I’m assuming he found water somewhere, because he’d be in a lot of trouble if he didn’t. He probably didn’t find food, but he wouldn’t die in four days. Hypothermia would be a bigger problem, but there’s probably a temperature cold enough to be uncomfortable but not cold enough to kill. But breathing a toxic atmosphere? For four DAYS? Or even three? Really dumb. I can only assume that the writers did this so they had a reason to show everyone getting dressed up in those scary, scary HAZMAT suits. Which frankly, was pants-on-head idiotic, as the risk of catching a disease from an entirely alien biosphere would have been enough to justify that.
The Creature: I think, for me, the development of the Creature (Demogorgon) was one of the most irritating things, because it was an example of a) a mistake I typically see from new writers, not professionals, and b) it would have been very easy to solve. Here was the basic problem: The writers wanted to give Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve a victory over the Creature. The writers also wanted to make the Creature something that only El could defeat. Something, to be exact, that El would have to apparently die to kill, because it would be immune to Human weapons. And the writers also wanted it to kill Brenner the Evil Scientist.
You can easily see what they did, and I used to make this mistake as a new writer, and I’ve seen new writers make that mistake many times: they wanted their Creature to have mutually contradictory qualities, and they tried to make that work. The result was that we have a Creature that is banished back to the Upside Down by kids armed with a spiked bat, a pistol, a bear trap, and some fire, but an episode later shrugs off hundreds of rounds of assault rifle fire at point-blank range like they were Super Soakers.
Now, the solution to this was pioneered as far back as Beowulf. All you needed was for Nancy, Jonathan and Steve to kill Grendel, and then have that draw the attention of bigger, badder Grendel’s Mom. This would have necessitated a bit of explanation, but certainly nothing too difficult.
Worlds: Stupid Sci-Fi Film Tricks, The Expanse Edition
SPOILER ALERT for Season 1 of The Expanse if it’s on your “to watch” list.
Are you effing kidding me, The Expanse? I mean, are you effing kidding me?
Here we have a show that most people I know in SF have been raving about, I mean, absolutely raving about for the last couple of years. So I finally decided to use my Amazon Free Prime trial and binge-watch a few episodes.
And it looks good. Man does it look good. Really, the only problem I have with it from a science perspective is I think that it VASTLY underestimates what happens to things and people when a hole is knocked into an Earth-pressure cabin in hard vacuum, but I’m pretty willing to let that slide, on the large scale of things. That’s like complaining about lasers being visible in space combat. Of course they wouldn’t be, but the Rule Of Cool, well, rules.
So, for the first six episodes, I just sat back and enjoyed the SFX, the dialogue, the action, and the whole ride. So, the Earth UN controls Ceres, capital of the Asteroid Belt, by rationing its air and water. Mars, an independent state, also hungers to control Ceres, and the Belters just want to breathe and drink and not die. There’s a Free the Belt movement, headed up by a freedom-fighter/terrorist organization called the OPA, and of course Earth Cops on Ceres try to keep these terrorists down.
As our story opens, one of our protagonists is an Earth Cop chasing an Earth heiress who sympathized with the OPA and who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. We find she has something to do with a freighter set up as bait to lure in an innocent rescue ship that is then attacked by parties unknown with evidence pointing to Mars, apparently with the goal of starting a war. Earth Cop finds more and more evidence tying missing heiress to a raid on a supersecret Martian research base.
And then, episode 7. Oh, gods….
So Earth Cop figures out that heiress was an agent of the OPA Maximum Leader, and assembles the evidence, bringing it straight to his boss… who promptly wipes his files, revokes his access codes and fires him. He figures out she’s in Maximum Leader’s pocket, and as he storms out, the camera focuses in on boss’s neck, where she is sporting an OPA tattoo.
Get that? The OPA’s paid agent, the chief of the Earth Cops in the Belt, is wearing a terrorist tattoo in plain sight, advertising her allegiance. Among detectives. And we’re supposed to believe that somehow, no one noticed this. I mean, this is like a U.S. Naval officer showing up for duty on his ballistic missile submarine in 1985 sporting a hammer-and-sickle tattoo on his wrist. You think someone might ask questions?
And the hell of it is, it’s completely unnecessary. I mean, I believed she could have been a mole. But no one in the solar system would be such a stupid mole and survive more than a month. It drives me nuts when filmmakers feel obligated to underline visually what’s happening for us as though we are too dumb to understand words and to imagine likely consequences of such actions. Stop it.
From Somewhere In Orbit
Yes, Star Wars Fans, It Was Always Possible To Track Ships Traveling In Hyperspace: The Evidence
In The Last Jedi, the plot hinges on the idea that it is impossible to track ships through a hyperspace jump without cutting-edge First Order technology. I am going to make my case that it was always possible to track ships through hyperspace, and that this plot point is an example of bad continuity.
Now at first glance, it seems that I am just wrong. After all, the Millennium Falcon always escapes Imperial pursuers by going to lightspeed. However, we need to examine the circumstances, here. Plainly, hyperspace jumps are not instantaneous, just very, very fast. Also, ships do not seem to be able to interact with each other physically (e.g. to fight battles) while in hyperspace. Our first encounter with hyperspace is with the Falcon jumping away from Tatooine. Let’s look at that scene:
We have seen the Falcon jump to hyperspace. Then much later, at least long enough for Luke to start lightsaber training and R2-D2 to get involved in a board game with Chewbacca, Han comes in and says, “Well, you can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. I told you I’d outrun ’em!”
At the total lack of reaction he then says, “Don’t everybody thank me at once.”
Now, why this announcement, if the jump to lightspeed in itself meant they were untrackable? The clear implication is that the Empire was (or may have been) following them, and Han has spent the intervening time making sure of their escape. Of course Han was rather confident of his ability to do this: he’s flying the ship that “made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs” after all (whatever that means) and believes himself to be one of the best star pilots in the galaxy.
Later, upon emergence in the Alderaan system, they encounter a TIE fighter. The exchange that follows is revealing:
LUKE: “It followed us!”
BEN: “No, it’s a short range fighter.”
The implication is that a longer-range craft could potentially have followed them. Ben isn’t just speculating about how it got there, because he doesn’t start that until his next line: “A fighter that small couldn’t have gotten this far into space on its own…”
Additionally, how is it possible that the Empire is chasing down Princess Leia’s ship at all at the beginning of the movie if there is no way to track ships through hyperspace? Rogue One clearly establishes that this has happened. Remember, Obi-Wan Kenobi, last of the Jedi Knights, is hiding out on Tatooine. There is nothing else of importance there and the Empire does not know he is there.
Now, in Empire we seem to see some of the strongest evidence that hyperspace tracking is impossible, because the Falcon’s final getaway is by jumping to lightspeed, and the whole plot of the film hinges on the Falcon’s broken hyperdrive. However, it seems reasonable that by this time the Empire has simply learned that the Falcon is uniquely able to elude pursuit by jumping to hyperspace because of its speed. If the Falcon can complete a jump and start a new one before Imperial forces arrive, then of course it cannot be tracked.
Now, when Han Solo pulls his disappearing act by charging the Star Destroyer, Darth Vader orders the Falcon’s trajectory extrapolated from “its last known trajectory,” after killing the Star Destroyer’s captain for incompetence. Clearly, Vader expected better. Perhaps that he could have tracked them through hyperspace? After all, how would Vader have known the hyperdrive was malfunctioning? That Han Solo pulled off a gutsy and complex maneuver that foiled the Empire’s ability to track them does not imply that no such tracking ability exists.
Finally, in Return of the Jedi, we have our strongest piece of evidence that tracking a ship through hyperspace is possible. It can be seen in this video at about 2:26-2:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBLXIMBAtaM
There is a screen showing the Death Star II, and a cloud of rapidly approaching dots, just as Leia says, “Han, the fleet will be here any second.” Occam’s Razor suggests, “Hey look, the Imperials are tracking the Rebel fleet in hyperspace as it approaches.”
Now, none of this makes The Last Jedi a crappy movie. As stated earlier, I quite liked it. But it’s not in line with earlier continuity, and to my mind, that’s just a bit of lazy writing. I invite all arguments, but they’re going to have to explain away all of these incidents, not just one of them.
From Somewhere In Orbit
Fear Itself: Why I Wear The Safety Pin. A Promise.
When Franklin Roosevelt said that the people of the United States had nothing to fear but fear itself, he was speaking of the fear of failure that had locked the United States into the Great Depression. Because people were afraid that all businesses would fail, they would invest no money, and without investors, no businesses could succeed.
Today, in the wake of last month’s election, we have many fearful people. Truth be told, we had many fearful people before the results of the election. The fear has not changed, for the most part. But the quality of the fear, and how it is being expressed, has changed immeasurably.
I was wrong about the way this election would turn out. The only consolation I have about that is that I was in very good company. But the reasons for my error are a topic for another time. It is apparent to me, and, I think, to many others, that one of the reasons the election played out as it did was the fear that permeates our society: the fear that caused us to be so very nearly evenly divided, and the fear that caused us to back two such hugely unpopular candidates.
It is my belief that this election turned out the way it did for two closely related reasons: that many people are afraid, and that we do not care that other people are afraid. I cannot tell you how many of my friends who chose to support Donald Trump did so because they believed that the government of the past eight years has actively scorned their fears. And they were told by supporters of that government that if they were afraid, it was because they were stupid or because they deserved it. And now those people voted for Donald Trump, and the result is that we have a whole other set of people who are afraid of what will happen to them. And already I am hearing Trump supporters, and others, disparage those fears, as if they are not worth having. I greatly sympathize with the people who do have those fears, because as I said before the election, Donald Trump has said things that, I believe, any person who cares for Constitutional government should be afraid of.
Now, I think it is plain that many of these people have already experienced cause to be afraid. My friend, Jim Hines, wrote an eloquent request to those of you who chose to support Donald Trump in this election. I think it is well worth reading. There are many people out there who have been emboldened by this man to do and say terrible things. I can add some. On election day, a friend of mine, who is black, had his tires slashed while he voted. I don’t know if that was politically or racially motivated (he himself did not say), but if I were him, I would think so. At church two weeks ago, a friend told me that his adopted cousin, from Colombia, who has been a citizen since childhood, was told by no less than four people this week that she could “go home now.”
This angers me beyond my capacity to express. The Republican Party was the party that freed slaves. It was the party of Abraham Lincoln. If conservatives stand for anything good in this nation, and we had damn well better, it means that we stand up for the rule of law. It means that we stand up for the rights of our citizens. It means that we protect them from anyone who would dare to harass them based on their religion, their skin color, their ethnicity, or their expressed political views. Conservatives follow and uphold the laws. We do not break them, and we do not support, by action or inaction, those who would break the law because they are on our “side.” Such an attitude is the betrayal and antithesis of ethical conservative principles.
I did not support Donald Trump in this election. If I have not made that plain over the past few months, I do not know how to make it plainer. I did not vote for him. I do hope, desperately, that I am wrong about the kind of President he will be. Nothing would make me happier, in four years, if I could say here, on this blog, “I was wrong. Donald Trump was a wise and just President, and I am happy to cast my vote for him in the 2020 election.” I didn’t think Hillary Clinton would make a good President. Had she been elected, I would be saying the same thing about her.
Nevertheless, I am a conservative. And because I am, I am less likely to feel the negative effects of this election personally than my fellow-citizens of other races, genders, religions and orientations. And it is vital that we stand up for them. It is vital that we stand up and say: “You are Americans. You have God-given rights, enumerated in our Constitution, and we will defend you from all of those who would seek to violate those rights.” We absolutely must do this, for two reasons: Firstly, it is the right and moral thing to do. If you supported Trump, do you remember how it felt, just weeks ago, when certain Clinton supporters called you evil and breezily expressed their hopes that a liberal Supreme Court would make you suffer simply for voicing your beliefs? Liberals are afraid that a conservative Supreme Court will do the same, and much more, to them. They are afraid that they will be rounded up and imprisoned based on their religious beliefs or their sexual preferences.
If you’re happy that what you feared won’t come to pass, that’s natural: no one sane should blame you. But if you’re glad that they are afraid? God help us all. Because we can’t have society, let alone government, when half the nation is scared to death of the other half. Secondly, if you fail to protect the opposition when you are in power, you are just asking to be shown no mercy when they are in power. And they will be in power again. Not in 2016, and maybe not in 2020. but someday. There is no permanent conservative majority, here. The liberals made the mistake of thinking history was on their side: that was one of the reasons they lost. Conservative Trump-supporters had better not make the same mistake!
We will never move away from this terrible election until our nation learns to reject fear. And we can never reject fear if we refuse to take each other’s fears seriously. And this is the moment for conservatives to do this, because we are in power (or at least people THINK we are, which is the only thing worse than actually BEING in power). Because the Trump voting was largely motivated by fear, this is the time for conservative Americans to stand up for something better. We must stand, at all costs, for protecting our fellow Americans. And that is why I will wear a safety pin. It says, specifically to those who fear, that I will stand for their safety against any who would harm them. No, it’s not much. No, it doesn’t make me a wonderful person; I don’t expect any damned applause for it; it’s the least I can do. It is only the beginning of all I am willing to do.
The limits of what I am willing to do, I can’t know. I don’t think anyone knows until they are tested. But for now, please understand that I am willing to do what I can to help you feel safe. If you need my expertise on history and politics, I will share it. If you need to tell someone you are afraid, I will listen. If you need help because someone is threatening you or violating your rights, please call on me and I will do whatever I can. Whatever you need me to, to the limits of my ability.
I do not think that now is the time to panic and leave the country. If I did, I would be making arrangements to move, right now. I do think that it is time to be watching our government very closely. I do not think that we are about to go down one of history’s darkest roads, but I think we are closer to that than we have yet been, and it concerns me deeply. So know this: no one takes my fellow Americans off to prison or throws them out of the country in violation of the Constitution without getting past me and my family. That’s what this country is about. If it should come to that, we will shelter you, we will hide you, and we will shield you. To this we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. We would consider it, as Corrie ten Boom’s father once said in WWII Holland, “the greatest honor that could come to our family” if we were to lay down our lives for you. And I believe the vast majority of my fellow conservatives are with me on that point.
Fortunately, such extremes as concentration camps are not yet happening. I hope they will not happen and will do whatever I can to prevent them from happening. But what concerns me more immediately is the disdain I see from some conservatives about even expressing concern for those who are frightened. Tell me: since when did not giving a shit about people become a conservative value? I mean, I get that a lot of conservatives are tired of being undeservedly called bigoted racist misogynists (I sure am), but surely the answer isn’t to BE all those things? Even if it were not morally wrong (which we know it is), it’s not in our interest. Andrew Carnegie said that keeping people loyal to capitalism required providing “ladders on which the aspiring can rise.” And if Donald Trump’s election shows us anything, it’s that WE NEED MORE DAMNED LADDERS! How on Earth can we conservatives surrender concern for people to the left, as “their” issue? Friends, that’s as stupid as when the left decided that “patriotism” was somehow a thing that right-wingers did. I’m unbelievably frustrated by this idea that caring about people makes us wimps. It’s what would make us worth voting for, dammit!
Bobby Jindal once said that the Republican Party had to “stop being the stupid party.” Whatever you think of him, he was right to say that. And conservatives have to stop being the party of not caring what people are afraid of. It stops here. It stops with me.
Call on me, Somewhere In Orbit.
A Plea to Conservatives On Behalf of Evan McMullin
I am writing this, my last series of political messages before the election, to my fellow conservatives. There will be little in it of value to liberals, except, I hope, a useful insight on how some conservatives think.
Over the past year, I have listened to a number of arguments for voting for Donald Trump. None of them have convinced me, and I remain adamant that conservatives should NOT vote for Donald Trump. I am going to attempt to answer those arguments here. The arguments may be summed up as follows: that we must vote for Donald Trump because he is a conservative. But he is not. The National Review says so.That we must vote for Donald Trump because he shares our values. But he does not. That we must vote for Donald Trump because he is the only candidate that can defeat Hillary Clinton, whom we cannot afford to allow to become President.
Now many of my readers at this point are doubtless thinking that as much as they agree with me, they cannot afford to have Hillary Clinton win the next election. They feel compelled to vote for Donald Trump because he is the best chance of stopping her. And they are both right and wrong. Certainly, Donald Trump will get the second-highest number of votes (both popular and electoral) in this election. But all reputable polls indicate that Hillary Clinton has already won. It is not even close. Therefore, I suggest that the argument for voting for Donald Trump because he is the only candidate that can beat Hillary Clinton is invalid. He cannot defeat her. True, he will come closer to defeating her than any other candidate, but that doesn’t matter. If you are jumping a 15-foot cliff, it matters not at all whether you jump two feet or twelve feet. You will not make it to the other side. Donald Trump will not be President.
This leaves us with only two questions: How do we want to display our character, as Conservatives, to the nation? And what should our strategy be?
On the character issue, voting for Donald Trump is, quite frankly, playing into the hands of the radical Left. He has become a liberal caricature of what conservatives are “supposed” to be. He has advocated racism, religious tests, limiting the freedom of the press in defiance of the Constitution, in suggesting that assaulting women is fun, dishonoring gold star families, in hinting that riots and assassination are legitimate political tactics. Have we forgotten who we are? We are conservatives! We who vote Republican vote for the party of Lincoln, the party of the 13th Amendment, the party of honorable service and courage in the face of those who would seek to intimidate the weak! We do not engage in tactics that are beneath us! And if we seek to win at ANY cost, no matter how base, no matter how violent, then we are not worthy to lead the United States of America. No, not even at the cost of a Clinton victory. It would surely be better to lose to the enemy than to become the enemy ourselves. Once our nation allied with Stalin. Do we remember the consequences? Republicans should remember the results of that Democratic bargain better than any! We should not and cannot tolerate Donald Trump’s subversion of our character, and if we vote for him, we are complicit in that subversion.
On the strategic side, the truth is harder to swallow. Many Republican voters, in their rush to embrace a candidate because of what he was not (an “insider” that they distrust because of Republican failure to bring them economic prosperity or victory in the culture war) failed to realize that he WAS in fact inexperienced in government and used to operating in a business environment where his money mattered more than his appeal to large numbers of people. This played into the Democrats’ hands and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Frankly, even if Trump COULD win this election, voting for him would be bad strategy: It would alienate the minorities we MUST win to our cause. It would be impossible for us to get rid of him in four years (whereas we may very likely rid ourselves of Clinton in four). And it would put the blame for electing a bad President directly on our own heads. If we must HAVE a bad President, at least let it not be our fault! This election is lost, and conservatives are not getting it back. So we are left with taking the long view.
The strategy that we must want above all else, is not to find ourselves back here in four years. We need to fundamentally change the Republican and Democratic Parties. And in all US history, there is only one way we have seen to change a major party, and that is for a third party to win states. It happened in 1892, 1912, 1948, and 1968. And each time, one of the major parties underwent a great character change, absorbing the values of the third party. And there is only one candidate that is capable of winning a state: Evan McMullin is quite likely to win the state of Utah. Therefore, I suggest it would be wise to vote for Evan McMullin. We must vote against the horrors of this terrible election so that we and our children will not be trapped in it again in four years. And in eight. And in sixteen.
Will McMullin win? No. Not this year. There is a remote chance that he could throw it into deadlock and toss the election to the House of Representatives, but that’s no more likely than a Trump victory. Hillary Clinton is, and I shudder to say it, the next President of the United States regardless of what we do. But McMullin can and will redirect national politics if he wins votes in the Electoral College. And consider in what position a solid conservative who won the first third-party electoral votes in fifty years — after a mere three months of campaigning – will be in four years from now. McMullin will not win the Presidency in 2016. But what about 2020? Please join with me, and vote for Evan McMullin.
It Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
One thing you will never run out of in this world is people to make your choices for you. In the current election cycle, we started out with a number of people who chose to run for President of the United States, and those choices have now been whittled, so we have been told, down to two: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has no qualifications that should make him a serious candidate for the highest office in our land, as I have said before. Every word out of his mouth betrays a vast ignorance of and carelessness toward the basic tenets and ideals of the Constitution. The thought of him in the Oval Office makes me cringe.
Hillary Clinton has been pursuing the Presidency with single-minded intensity since 1996. It is her highest goal, and she wants it so badly that it frightens me. No one who wants power that badly is someone I trust with it. And as for her policies, no one said it better than P.J. O’Rourke: “She is wrong. Wrong on every issue. But at least she is wrong within normal parameters.” O’Rourke said this on National Public Radio, as a backhanded endorsement of Clinton (which is astonishing in itself. For those who may not know, O’Rourke is a lifelong conservative Republican).
Predictably, millions of people are looking for an alternative to these two candidates and recommending those candidates. And just as predictably, the same tired old beating stick is being hauled out to stop them: “If you vote for a third party, you’re just throwing your vote away. A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Hillary,” (or alternatively, a vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote for Trump, though that’s looking less common now, as Bernie doesn’t seem to be contemplating an independent run, more’s the pity).
I was going to say something clever about this, but I’ve decided that it would be better to simply call this out for what it is: it is a lie. It is a lie, it is a damned lie, and I will not endure this lie any more. If we live in a free society, then the vote I cast means that I believe the person for whom I cast my vote is the best candidate for President of the Untied States. As a citizen of the United States, a nation which I love and respect (despite its flaws and sins, and they are many), it is my right and my duty to take that seriously. And moreover, it is my right to insist that a vote for Gary Johnson (or any third-party candidate, but I’m going to go with Johnson for now) is a vote for Gary Johnson. Not for Hillary. Certainly not for Trump. And if one of those two candidates wins anyway, then the onus, and the praise, for their election lies with those who chose to vote for them. It does not lie with me, or with you, if you dare to support a third party.
I have written about this before, and the plain truth is that other people do not get to choose where and how you spend your time and moral energy. Our nation has a moral claim on our actions, and deserves our loyalty. Political parties do not, nor should they. If they want our vote, they must earn it, and both Republican and Democratic parties have been doing a spectacular job of not earning our votes for the past two decades.
Can a third party win? Probably not. For the first time in thirty years I see a small — a tiny — chance that the Libertarians might pull off the upset. It would require some great stupidity on the part of both major candidates (a quality neither seems to be short of, but we’re talking heroic amounts of it) and brilliance on the part of Gary Johnson, but it might happen.
But whether our candidates can win or not isn’t the damned point! We’ve been altogether too worried in this nation about whether our candidates, our visions of the future, can win. And to that monstrous obsession of victory, we have sacrificed all other considerations, and now we wonder why our leaders seem to be completely unaccountable to us? The truth is that they are unaccountable because we do not hold them accountable. They are unaccountable because they know we will vote for them, not in the name of our ideals, not in the name of their policies, but in the name of winning. In the name of Not Letting Those Other Bastards Get Their Way.
They are unaccountable for the same reason that Jerry Sandusky was unaccountable: because winning was considered a sacred idol worth sacrificing our children to.
I will not sacrifice my children on the altar of Winning.
And here’s another hard truth. The people who win for their unpopular causes are the people who are willing to lose for a long damned time. If there’s one lesson the rest of us need to learn from our Black brothers and sisters, it’s how to lose, and keep on fighting. Black Americans fought for Civil Rights since practically 1866, and it took almost a hundred years for them to start winning. A winning third party (surely a much smaller goal than all of Civil Rights for Black Americans) will never win until people stand up and are willing to lose for it. And that starts by preferring principles and ethics to winning, even when it looks hopeless. And preferring them again. And again. Until we win. Until we take this nation back from those who would smugly tell us, that they have a claim on our votes simply because they can win.
My vote is not for Hillary. My vote is not for Trump. If you want to interpret it that way, go right ahead. I don’t care to stop you. But you’re not changing my vote, either. And you’re not tarring me with the blame when someone I did not vote for wins. That’s ridiculous, ethically, on the face of it. If you stand up and admit that you are voting for an evil politician because you can’t stand to see a more-evil politician win, then that is your choice, but stand up and own it. Have the courage to say out loud that what you are doing is voting for evil.The fact that you have numbers on your side does not make it less evil. And it does not give you the right to throw blame on people who chose not to share in that evil. What kind of perverted moral viewpoint does it take to contend that the few people who stand up and vote for what they believe is good are somehow more responsible for a bad outcome than the many people who cowered and voted for what they believed was second-worst?
Make your choice. Take responsibility for your choice. You will not make mine.
From Somewhere In Orbit
G. Scott Huggins 