Indignant Desert Birds

Enter the Octopus asks: So, is Orson Scott Card off your reading lists, or what? My title answers the question, but not for the obvious reasons…

Quite simply, Scott Card’s work has gone from brilliant to awful so precipitously that I really do wonder if perhaps Ender’s Game was a very lucky stroke. Or perhaps Card has become more religious as he’s grown older, and that is what has led to the deterioration of his writing ability.

Any way around, Empire was so bad that I won’t read another book by him. Interestingly, it was bad because it indulged in right-wing paranoid delusions about Progressives. The book pained a picture of human behavior that was so at odds of what I know human behavior to be that I simply couldn’t believe anyone had been paid to write it.

Ah well. We’ll always have Ender’s Game…

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Lenin would know exactly what it’s all about. I’m shocked that John “if it’s less than 500 years old, it has no value” Weidner would be making a Beatles reference. Also: why would he be making this Beatles reference?

It seems to undercut his point just a bit…

Since John doesn’t seem to understand the difference between Marriage with 2 adults, and:
1) Marriage with 1 adult and 1 infant
2) Marriage with 1 adult and 2 other adults.
3) Marriage with 1 adult human and 1 dog (of undetermined age)
and
4) Marriage with 1 adult human and 1 Robot (with great attractiveness)

Let me spell it out for him: Infants, dogs, and Robots can’t consent to marriage. Nor, indeed, anything else. As for polygamous relationships: most of the time, they’re relationships based on coercion and quite frankly involve children and adults. Show me 3 adults who all wish to marry one another and we’ll have a whole separate conversation..

So in my world, marriage must be based on two things: 1) love 2) the wiliness of people capable of giving consent to give consent. Against this, John Weidner presents a fear of “communism”, fear of “change”, and fear of “ickiness” (the last is inferred).

My principles tell me that lines should be drawn as broadly and as widely as possible, to let all people within the sweet embrace of society. What possible defense does John have for limiting the rights of individuals to participate in society?

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What we say:
We need to create new regulatory environments wherein the market is nudged to invest in critical infrastructure. We may need to raise taxes to create some of this rich infrastructure, but it will give to everyone– rich and the poor alike– a better country. This is in no way Socialism*

What they hear:
We need to raise taxes on the rich to give to the poor. This is Socialism.

This is why conversations between parties are so frustrating; we’re speaking entirely different languages. Democrats want a functional State that takes care of the needs of the people. Republicans want a minimal State that doesn’t have the power to hurt the people.

The irony**, from where I sit is that a weak Federal Government tends not to be able to protect its citizens against depredation. The Conservative, laissez faire, ideology really has allowed for workers to be paid virtually nothing. State protected collective bargaining organizations are the only thing which allows for power between bargainers to be balanced. And so forth.

They see Socialism, we see citizens acting in their best interests for the common good. And so, on it goes…

*While I was in Ohio, many of the Brits were deeply amused by how much “socialism” was a dirty word in this country…

**I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that this irony is unintentional.

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Then what do we call 272,171? If you’re Rachel Lucas, you see 1 in every 464 American households as idiots.

If you’re a bit smarter, though, or at least a bit better educated, you start to wonder at the structural issues. What you might wonder what would cause so many hundreds of thousands of people to make the same mistake all at the same time? . And then you start digging into the history of the mortgage industry and find this picture:

(image stolen from Brad DeLong)

Oh. It seems we used to have regulations that prevented these loans. And then we didn’t. And then the loans got bad. And now we have foreclosures. Must just be 200,000 isolated cases of idiocy, then. It’s certainly not the fault of the bankers…

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