Freedom, democracy and fuckin' shit up

Even when I think Chuck's mistaken, he does make me chuckle.

The Campaign Autopsy: McCain was the most worthy nominee ever to lose.

"In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.

This was not just a meltdown but a panic. For an agonizing few days, there was a collapse of faith in the entire financial system -- a run on banks, panicky money-market withdrawals, flights to safety, the impulse to hide one's savings under a mattress.

This did not just have the obvious effect of turning people against the incumbent party, however great or tenuous its responsibility for the crisis. It had the more profound effect of making people seek shelter in government.

After all, if even Goldman Sachs was getting government protection, why not you? And offering the comfort and safety of government is the Democratic Party's vocation."

True dat, Charles. True dat.

Does anyone remember Bobby Kennedy? Or Barry Goldwater? McCain is an enormously good man. Who lost fair and square.

Every political party will protect you from any and every possible calamity. For a price. That price is typically your liberty.

I'll take the freedom and the responsibility. For the sake of my dignity as much as for my conscience.

Democracies don't get this question right, every time. They fail at it miserably and often, is the truth. It's much of the history of humanity as much as the history of liberal democracy. That's why the Greeks warned humanity about its hubris. Because everyone and every generation thinks that they will finally be the one to figure it all out.

Good luck with that, morons.

Homo sapiens are often a terribly foolish species. We think we know it all. And we turn to repression and aggression to solve problems and resolve fears that repression and aggression have never, can never, and will never resolve.

And I am homo retardus numero uno.

I spent all week being pissed off and aggressive with kids when they were handling things badly in ways that I'm perfectly clear were counterproductive. I am an alpha male dumbass. And the whole thing was exactly what I say about everyone else right down the fuckin' line: I was too afraid that I was being too nice and soft. So I was being kind of a dick. And I dealt with the consequences. Until I wised up, that is.

Human beings are often a foolish, foolish species. So foolish that it's the way we, eventually, we get to be so intelligent, the feature that distinguishes us most clearly from the rest of life on the planet. Smarter than any other species, I suppose. We learn from the wisdom of others. We learn from experience. And we learn from fucking things up. It is the hallmark of our species. The learning, that is. And all the fucking up that goes with it.

Aggression is sometimes necessary and useful in very limited circumstances. But the problem with this species, the predators and aggressors we are, is that we have such a hard time facing up to the fact that our aggression betrays us, often. All too often. It is our intelligence and not our aggression that generally rescues us from ourselves. And when we do need to use aggression, the least possible necessary measure of it is our wisest path to its use and to creating space for correcting our so frequent mistakes in its use.

Mark Twain was not joking about what dumbasses we are. He was dead serious. Even as he was cracking my shit up.

Freedom and democracy aren't our most important values because we get things right all the time. They're our most important values because we get things wrong so often. And, as often, because we never like to admit when we fuck things up. And freedom and democracy are the best pathes for making choices, reflecting on them, and picking up when we screw up.

All I know is that I need to cut out the bullshit. I'm easily as big a dumbshit as any caveman that ever roamed the earth praying I could scare off any threat I face.

What's different is that I have an education, meaning what I've learned from all of the accumulated learning of those who have gone before me. Meaning all their fuckin' up. And what that offers me is not some damned fool guarantee of any goddamn thing.

What my learning and education offers me is an opportunity to understand, better, my own fucking up. And do better tomorrow than I did today.

And I get to do it in one of the most stable, mature, and robust liberal democracies in the world. Warts and all.

I'll take it.