From Chris Rock in an interview in the Onion’s AV club:

I try not to get caught up with the critics. The critics like only a few people. Most of them aren’t that funny. I’m always of the mindset that if only smart people like your shit, it ain’t that smart. If a guy drives a truck and he doesn’t get your jokes, something’s wrong there. I’m not saying you have to dumb it down, but they sell newspapers to everybody, not just the smartest people in the country. Everybody buys the newspaper. Everybody kind of watches the news. Your comedy can appeal to a wider audience if it’s funny.

In other words, why GW got elected.

I felt a little bit better after reading this article by William Rivers Pitt, New York Times and international bestseller of “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know’”and ‘”The Greatest Sedition is Silence.” I’ll probably write more later on why, but it’s partly due to his insane anecdote, and partly because he’s another voice who’s agreeing with the Chomskyan view I currently hold, that it’s the continued success of “manufacturing consent”, not just “moral values”, that was the real reason things turned out the way they did. (though neither of us is denying the facts about this moral values thing…). Anyway, I recommend it.

To whet your appetite, here’s an except (or you can click the link):

Despite these bright spots, the inscription on my memorial rock – ‘There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election’ - seems absurd in the face of all this. Maybe it’s the concussion talking, but I honestly believe the rock is right. For one thing, worse than losing the election would be a collective acceptance of the reasons we are being given for why the election was lost. We hear from every mainstream media quarter that the election was lost because more people lined up with Bush on the question of ‘Values.’ There is a degree of truth to this. Eleven states had referendums on the ballot about gay marriage, for one example. The Republican base flooded to the polls to vote against it. This helped Bush, surely, along with some other ‘Values’-oriented issues, but this does not account for the final result. He was going to get that vote anyway. There is an elephant in the room here, and ignoring it would be worse than the electoral defeat.

The result of this election is nothing more or less than the culmination of a three-year terror campaign waged by the Bush administration and his campaign crew. Every day for three years, the American people were bombarded with messages of fear from the administration. Day after day, the Bush administration used September 11 to cow any and all dissent, to bend popular will, to frighten people into thinking that voting against Bush was a vote for death and destruction.

(more…)

Today Marc sent me this awesome visualization of the election results. It goes perfectly with my rant below about the electoral college and the illusion of the red and blue divide in the US.

It’s also interested that, if you compare the top map to the bottom map showing the light emitting by the US, giving a very good idea about population density, it becomes abundantly clear, that not only is the divide an illusion, but that in the areas where poeple actually live, the states are way darker purple and bluish. The only really red states are the ones were very few people live! The cities are bluer (even in the south and midwest) and they get more purple as you get into the burbs. I’m curious about how much weight the electoral college gives to these red areas of the country just because they are states. What would happen if that whole red, sparsely populated area of the country, which seems to have relatively similar concerns, were made into one state? Would it balance things? Would it really be that unfair, if indeed they have the same concerns and views there, as opposed to the rest of the country, where it’s all purpley? I don’t think that’s an answer, but sort of a thought experiment. I clearly think they should scrap the whole thing in favor of something that um… makes sense. But I don’t know how that could ever happen. Oh and yes, I know he won the popular vote.

You should follow the link to see the full images and information, but here’s some thumbnails.

Bask in the red and blue make violet glow of Java-generated mathematical visualization.

I’m not sure whether it’s the loss, my ongoing confusion about the direction of my life, or the lack of sleep that’s plunging me into the worst state of mind I’ve experienced in years, but that’s that. I can’t sleep. I can’t work. I can barely think. Apparently I can still surf and write. I looked to my bookmarks for something, Z Mag offers the usual leftist anger and polemic, the news has nothing to say, but repeats the empty words of these empty politicians.

I don’t know what I’m looking for. Maybe someone to say what’s really on our minds. That the majority of the power in this country, the executive and legislative, soon the judicial, is in the hands of people who’s values who are fundamentally opposed to mine, and to about half the people in every part of the country. They’ve declared that less this clear split is actually a “mandate” for the so-called conservative agenda. Which amounts to homophobia, misogyny, bigotry, warmongering, fearmongering, lack of concern for the environment, lack of care for the opinions of the rest of the planet. Ignorance.

I’m not sure how much it matter why he won. The question is, what the fuck do we do now? Give up on this country and expatriate, taking our vision elsewhere? Follow as Gandhi and Martin Luther King and start a campaign of civil-disobience? Civil war & revolution claiming that the system has failed, like they did in 1776? I hope some really smart, really great leaders step up soon to fill this vacuum. And maybe for the moment, that’s all there is left to do. Hope.

But maybe we don’t need brains or guts or military prowess next time. Bush doesn’t have any of those things. This piece on Slate seems to be saying that we just need our own simple, god-fearing kinda guy to run for president. Play the stupid game. (Then give him a cabinet of leftists to pull his strings just like they did).

It’s being reported by several sources that a few of the mains reasons why I so utterly despise this administration, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz, won’t continue on for another four years. That is, they’ll resign or be fired. Fred Kaplan of Slate sites a few reasons why, which are being echoed elsewhere. Bush has always seemed like an ignorant simpleton to me, but I never thought of him as evil or scary in the way that I do these guys in his cabinet of doom. Somehow this doesn’t make me feel that much better, but it’s a start. Hope.

The Unbearable Darkness of Being by Lakshmi Chaudhry, senior editor of AlterNet, is all I’ve found so far that comes close to saying something relevant to me.

Pain. Nausea. Sorrow. It really is that bad.

I voted today. While most of the country is still counting the ballots, in the state I voted in, Illinois, Kerry has already won by a fairly large majority (61.7% and) and Barack Obama won the Senate seat by a landslide (75%). Same thing last time I voted for president in NJ. No matter how it turns out, I’m still gonna feel jaded. The electoral college, that wonderful system designed specifically as a failsafe, keeping one degree of separation between the ignorant masses and the important decisions they are supposed to make as citizens in a democracy, has once again done the opposite. I will now proceed with a short diatribe of the electoral college.

Whether or not we want to admit it, the voting power of millions, the majority of the country, is rendered impotent by the predilection of our “elected leaders” to stick with our founding fathers’ foresight and count the vote using a weighted equation. As I’m sure you know, each state gets one for each member of Congress - that’s two for each Senator, a number which is negligible and might as well just be subtracted off because it’s the same for every state, plus the the number of Representatives. There are a fixed number of seats in the House, and the number of Reps is determined by a ratio of population to the number of seats, plus or minus one (determined by subtracting the integer part of the quotient from the geometric mean of this integer and the next consecutive integer. x - y = bullshit. pfffft).

The weighting is partially designed to give a voice to states whose concerns would otherwise go unheard, i.e. farmers and country-folk with supposedly very different concerns and needs would get drowned out by city-folk. This assumes that farmers and country-folk all have the same “concerns”, and likewise for city-folk. It kind of looks that way if you look at these wonderful (asinine) red and blue maps you see everywhere, but if you actually look at the percentages of the popular vote in these states, even W could see that it’s clearly not that way. People in farm states are split. They don’t have the same concerns. In the states Bush has already won, you see 38% in Texas for Kerry, and over 40% in most of the South. And Flordia. Florida, a state with 27 electoral votes, the percentages are almost equal.

This idea that the South or the hearland is full of gun-toting, bible-bearing yokels is a farce! Bill J. Clinton, the living embodiment of the Democratic party, is from Arkansas for chuck’s sake. It’s just not true. It’s an illusion, a distortion, and it’s screwing up the country. The fact is that millions of people all over the supposed Republican strongholds do not feel that their concerns are represented by the Republican party. To be fair, the exact same hold true for the Democratic party — those big percentages are there in all the “metro” states also. That retro vs metro rhetoric that I thought was interesting the other day — I’ve given it some though and the numbers show it’s bullshit. Religious people in Alabama like Kerry and middle-class soccer moms in Jersey like Bush, this whole thing is way messier than the red and blue map shows, and I believe it’s close to the heart of why this country feels so divided.

Why am I getting so incensed? If you read my blog, I know that you know that the system is screwed. But in case you’ve just consumed the sound bite that the electoral college is screwed, hopefully, now I’ve utterly convinced you that it’s FUBAR. Until it’s fixed, we don’t live in a democracy (by even the wildest strech of the imagination). If the terrorists we’re waging war against hate democracy, the joke is clearly on them. The two party system and the lack of differences amongst the candidates aside, most of this country is, to use the popular term, “disenfranchised”; that is, “dispossessed of the rights of a citizen, or of a particular privilege, as of voting, holding office, etc.” It’s a mathematical fact.

So as usual, when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds against the forces of Truth and Justice, we must ask: what are we to do? Not voting clearly isn’t an option, you gotta do it “just in case.” If there’s any issue that matters in this country right now, it’s this one. I need to write some letters.

I was looking something up on dictionary.com and saw this ad. it worked i guess, b/c I was curious enough to click on it. It brought be to this web page for this book & it’s author: retro vs. metro. Not terribly enlightening, but a great little title, and the Rants & Raves section is pretty funny/scary.

I here people talking a lot about these clashes of civilizations though (and by people I mean editorials and random Ds and Rs calling in to NPR). The Islamic world “versus” the Judeo-Christian West. . . the conservative, religious south & midwest (retro) vs. the scattered, progressive, urban areas (metro). My brain keeps going back to Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. I haven’t looked at the original works in about 7 years… since I was 17… and I can only remember the gists of these great works. Man is good, man is bad, conflict is a result of the state, fighting is innate. But as usually my mind is stuck on philosophy and what the Truth is about human nature and society (note the capital “T”).

On a side note, I think it’s interesting that Rousseau, the guy who thought people are innately good and noble, is portrayed in the paintings as a smiling, happy dude with a nice wig and fancy French duds, whereas Hobbes, the dude who says people are animals and the state is necessary to keep us in line, is portrayed as a crotchedy old man with a Puritanical fashion sense.

God I have work to do! All I was trying to is remember the exact, formal definition of what makes up an “algebra” and - ZAP! - 30 minutes of my life gone. Damn you internet! (or lack of personal willpower (!)).

I probably shoulda went to FOLDOC anyway. More precise (nerdy) and no ads. Had I gone there, I would be certain to follow links allowing me to learn (waste time learning) about things like magmas and abelian monoids. Clearly more useful procrastinative efforts than thinking about the fundamental nature of humanity.