House of Eratosthenes

The Census is a ten-year event so people should be talking about it more. It says something, if anybody’s willing to take the time to notice, about the policies that arouse such passion between these ten-year events. California and New York are losing congressional seats. This is part of a pattern you can see now — with every gain and every loss — so it isn’t just those two states. I’m seeing, among the states losing seats, the only one that could be described as “red” is West Virginia, and among those gaining the only one that could be described as “blue” is Oregon. Each of those is highly debatable, and apart from those two, it’s a clean sweep.

With the last election as close as it was, this is a referendum.

As a referendum, it is not an outlier. Left-wing indictments against the “systemic racism” of the United States, our “patriarchy,” our use of God’s Measurement System as opposed to the flaky Metric surrender-monkey kilo-centi-stuff, guns guns guns, etc. etc. etc…are mere flies upon the windshield of: Which way are the boats headed? This one counter-argument defeats all of those attacks. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. The immigration crisis exists because people want to come here. Yes President Biden made it much worse, but not by making anything work any better than it was working before. He made it worse by saying “come on in!”

The interstate situation is somewhat different, since you don’t need to immigrate when you move from one state to another. And it’s clear there’s a lot of movement. It’s clear that, when leftists run things for awhile, people don’t want to live there anymore and that includes leftists. People in general should be spending more time wondering about this. I think both sides would agree The Right simply wants to keep businesses running; we can argue about whether they’re empowering evil soulless corporations that are polluting the environment or trying to make sure no one has any health care, or whether they’re really just trying to make it easy for people to work for a living. But I think all up and down the ideological spectrum people would agree that’s the overall point, and they’d be right. The Left, on the other hand, wants to Build A Perfect World, in which people have full and unrestricted access to the blah blah blah and there is no more blah blah blah. People in general would agree with that and they’d be right about that too. So where’s the perfect world? How come people keep leaving it after it materializes?

Why — The Left would retort — is The Left running everything right now? The White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. There’s an old Reagan quote that comes to mind: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Blogs, like this one, don’t really help over the shorter term of time because we explain. If you pay attention while you’re doing this explaining, after a prolonged period of repeated experiences you’ll gradually come to see the wisdom of what Ronald Reagan was saying. People don’t like having things explained to them, even obvious things — especially obvious things. There is no explanation of the right-wing position that leaves a mark, at least, none that leaves a mark on par with simply letting The Left run things for awhile. That is convincing. No right-wing pundit could have delivered a smackdown that would make an impression quite like the two years of putting The Left in charge 1993-1994, or 2009-2010, or 2021-2022. Lots of righties would like to come up with one that does. But it hasn’t happened. I don’t think the human genome permits it. We have to go through the misery of bad ideas to figure out how bad they are. It’s in our genetic wiring. Can’t figure out what a bad idea it was to bite that apple, until we’re cast out of the Garden of Eden.

People talk about “Republicans are dead” or “the democrat party is finished” or “The United States is over.” When they say things like this they’re admitting to their own limitations as they attempt to comprehend a sustained conflict. The concept is an uncomfortable one for us, but that’s the environment in which we live. We live in a tempest in a teapot. There are forces in play which keep the conflict going. The Left has bad ideas; if it were not so, they’d merely take over at any one of the three biannual chapters mentioned in the previous paragraph, we’d all see what good ideas they have, and we’d leave it that way. That hasn’t happened. The Right cannot make an impression on people, that’s on par with letting their opposition run things; if that were not so, any one of a number of pundits or bloggers, like me, would state the case and then the next election would be a rout. That hasn’t happened either. The United States is far from over, and people want to live here. If that were not so, we wouldn’t have an immigration crisis.

The one thing that keeps things screwed up, that might be the easiest to fix, is this “purpling” thing. Blue states losing their population as refugees swarm to red states, with better policies, is nothing new. It’s been happening in California since I moved in, swimming upstream against the crowd, some thirty years ago. If only people would move in to red states and then vote like they’re in a red state, problems would dissipate over time the way problems do when people are applying their intelligence. But we’ve seen how blue-state refugees don’t do that. Their tendency is to vote, in the new state, for the same dumb policies that made their old states miserable, and worth leaving. This has been a constant source of distress to the newer states undergoing the purpling-process. Please remember, they say, you’re refugees and not missionaries. But the refugees don’t listen.

Is there an answer? Maybe some hurdles, some barricades to help thwart this purpling process. But overall, there may not not be an answer. We may be doomed to swim around in this tempest in a teapot forever, as a “reward” for our continued refusal to learn what a dumb, bad policy is. Our system of elected representation is what I like to call a Batman system: It gives us the government we deserve, not necessarily the one we need.

The “purpling” doesn’t end until virtue signaling has a cost.

If I were to announce my real beliefs, to any but my closest friends in private, I’d be driven out of society. 13% percent of the population commits 50% of the homicides – a 100% true fact, but I could kiss my job goodbye if I said it in the office. Meanwhile, Leftie can spout the most awful make believe and nothing happens, so why would they stop?

Nature has a nearly perfect mechanism for indicating bad ideas. It’s called PAIN. Unfortunately the pain of moving is not sharp or durable enough to spur reflection, so something else is needed.
- Severian | 05/03/2021 @ 13:34
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- House of Eratosthenes – Pokemon Go Guide | 06/27/2021 @ 07:30

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Voting With Your FeetFriday, April 30th, 2021

Voting With Your Feet
Friday, April 30th, 2021