12th post!!

Well this blog entry is to just make it to 12 posts for the month of September. A new record!

Chris has been having issues with our method of electing political leaders in this country for a few months now. Chris is a really fart smeller.. err .. highly intelligent person and I guess it's hard watching inefficiency go on in front of him especially when it's a process that's important to our future. Anyway the topic of the upcoming presidential debates came up on my end. They are not debates but rather commercials for the candidates. A true debate is a dialog between 2 or more people (except in the case of schizophrenia, you can debate with your selves) where ideas and opinions are defended. The process is to show the opinion for what it's worth. If the observer thinks an opinion is poorly defended then he may think this opinion is not worthy. That's the purpose of debates, to hammer an opinion and see how well it survives. It's not about right vs. wrong opinions but how well can it stand up on it's own. There's a lot that can be learned from a debate. I've often taken an viewpoint that I don't agree with just to create a debate and see how well I can defend it. In some cases I've almost changed my viewpoint because I was able to defend the opposite so well. Anyway the presidential debates are more what I call a “forum”. A chance for each candidate to air his opinions on subject matter. For the most part these opinions are canned speeches and really give the observer nothing. I saw a report on CNN the other day how each candidate's election crew argue over camera angles, lighting and even how high up their candidate stands behind the podium. This goes on all the way up to an hour before the debate. It's a commercial people! Lights! Camera! Action!

Published Wed, Sep 29 2004 2:38 PM by craigg75
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# re: 12th post!!

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 4:52 PM by fractalnavel
an even more important milestone - this was your overall post number 69 ;-)

how well a viewpoint is defended says nothing about the viewpoint itself, eh ? that's still appearances, albeit intellectual vs. media pretense. i'd rather have an executive who stands for and carries out the "right thing", even if he hasn't a clue why it's right.

so what seems really to be imporant is the people and policymakers that a candidate surrounds themselves with once in office. i'd like to see the full teams ahead of the election, let _them_ duke it out.

in any case, it's not inefficiency that bothers me, it's the disconnect between the populace's aggregate stance on an issue and how we get to address it - through representatives. they are - _were_ - only necessary because of the impracticality of every individual participating directly. with today's technology, that's an anachronistic concern. i only mention efficiency in order to point out that it's no longer a valid objection. if there _is_ a need for a synthesizing or buffering process or what have you, we can explicitly engineer that directly. so what i'm saying is that we can have a true democracy instead of having to compromise because of the limits inherent in choosing individuals. and with the elimination of those foci of power, we also behead the marketing beasts - and these farces called "debates" along with them.

note that this makes "the people and policymakers that a candidate surrounds themselves with" _us_. there is no longer a need for a candidate. all that is needed is a clerk that can follow instructions.

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