I think its likely.

What I find most frustrating about that fact is that is entirely possible not to think like an idiot.  It’s a trainable skill to think clearly.

We spend a huge amount of money educating people and what we accomplish in 12 years is teaching them to read, possibly to write, and occasionally to be able to add up numbers.

We fail miserably at education.  Mostly because we think education is about learning facts rather than learning the skill of thinking intelligently.

If you spend anytime on the internet, you will see countless people make ridiculous points, that have no logic, and/or no basis in fact.  They never bother to run an idea through any kind of critical thinking, never bother to do the most minimal research on an idea.

We don’t have to live like this.  We don’t have to have people starving.  Dying of curable diseases.  Living without shelter, dying in violence.  We don’t have to strip the earth of all it’s resources and have our descendents die slowly in horrible circumstances because we were just too stupid to allow them the privilege of life.

But we do.  We do because we are stupid.

And the more people there are in any group, the stupider the group becomes.  And humans do tend to herd ourselves into groups, virtually as well as in real life.  And once we are in the group, all we hear is the echo chamber of our own ideas and so we don’t feel any compulsion to consider anything differently.

And all of it is within our power to do differently.  All of it.  It only requires thought.  And a desire for the greater good.  But even if you are just a selfish clod, you must recognize the benefit gained to yourself by the greater good.  Well, you recognize it when you use your brain to think critically.

So little hard thinking is done in this world.   And eventually it will kill us.

I’ve been following the UK Brexit Referendum.  I worry that it’s a sign of the coming times for the US.

A sign that the people who claim fear instead of compassion will change the direction that humanity has been crawling.  The direction of peace and a place for everyone.

A sign that the people who only want only Us and not Them will win in every country and the world will become more divided and violent.

A sign that humanity will never grow out of the kindergarten stage of recess name calling and poking and gratuitous violence.

A sign that the few will always direct the fear of the many to their own advantage the demise of a truly civilized civilization.

A sign that if they win, Trump will follow.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  We were going to grow out of it.  How did we end up here?

 

There have been 136 mass shootings in the US so far this year.

After a gunman entered a school and killed 5 & 6 year old children, we did…. NOTHING.  No.  I’m wrong.  The NRA convinced the elected officials of this country to resist any increase in gun regulation.  So we did do something, we STOPPED any change from happening.

After San Bernadino, the NRA again convinced the morally challenged congress to avoid regulation on guns for terrorists.   You can’t bring hair gel on a plane, but according to the NRA, someone on a terrorist watch  list should not be deterred from buying a gun in U.S.  The NRA says we might deter someone who is accidentally on the watch list.  So… maybe a dozen people in a year might try to buy a weapon and be stopped erroneously.  THAT would be a FAR GREATER PROBLEM than hundreds of people dying from legally purchased weapons.   Because some people might be inconvenienced, so screw all the people who die or get wounded.

So let’s discuss why.

THE NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION is to blame.  Let’s not mince words.  I’m not even going to try and be nice about it.  It’s lost it’s original intention of being a group of like minded individuals promoting responsible gun ownership.  It’s become a political lobby that has lost all sense of morality.

The Gun Manufacturers are to blame.  They, and do not be naive and doubt this, are the real instigators of this problem. They merely use the NRA as their shill.  So when I say NRA – its important to remember – the NRA, despite being proud of its many individual members, is essentially a mask for the Gun Manufacturers.

Why use the mask?  Compare these two positions.  Large Corporation wants to make money and so wants to keep Congress from gun regulation.  VS Individual Citizens want to have the right to hunt and protect themselves.  Get it?

Gun Manufacturers cannot directly support the NRA’s PAC.  BUT they can support the NRA generally.  They can make sure those in charge of the NRA are… well funded.  Generally speaking that means buying “advertising”.  I imagine other exchanges of benefit happen for various executives, but I’m not going to spend time looking into it.  Based on the NRA’s general morality, I would frankly be shocked if that wasn’t happening.

The NRA then focuses itself in two areas:

1. Recruitment through evangelizing it’s imperative to own a gun at any cost
2. Using its membership dues and membership numbers to force its agenda on congress.

Why?  Well, suppose you want to sell guns – you don’t want people to have a hard time getting them, right?  All businesses lobby for their right to do business with their customer.  Except it’s not quite that straightforward.

The thing about guns is that in a normal life, people don’t want more than 1, maybe 2 if you have a rifle for hunting and a handgun for personal protection.  But see, that is not a good thing if you SELL guns.  It limits your potential market. The answer to this is to artificially inflate your market.

FIRST,  you must convince people that guns are about to be scarce.  How?  You create a terribly decisive controversy around them.  You make sure that every time 49 humans are killed in a nightclub, all of your customers get afraid that they won’t be able to buy another gun ever, and so they run out to a gun store and buy guns IMMEDIATELY.  They already have a gun, but they might never be able to get another one, and so it’s better to hoard now for the imagined future need.  That’s the way our monkey brains work.  Monkey brains don’t work on logic, they work on emotional fear of lack.  Marketers know this and will advise you wisely to create this fear to increase your sales.

SECOND: You turn guns into a hobby.  A collectible, like Beanie Babies. And so people like having multiple guns for no other purpose but having them is “fun”.  As a result of this mentality, the US has 101 privately owned guns per 100 people.   Innocent people are dying because a small group of people want to have the right to collect an unreasonable number of deadly weapons for fun.  And the NRA is there to convince both them and your congressman that they should have an unencumbered right to do it.  No matter how many people are killed because of it.

THIRD:  You make ownership of a gun an underdog pursuit. An excellent advantage to fighting  the apparently logical and ethical choice to regulate guns is that it creates the sense that a small group of people is being mistreated by the government.  You turn the idea of guns into an essential right and it becomes a battleground.

Then you create a narrative with this battle that makes people tie their identity to the gun ownership.  People don’t own guns, they are gun owners.  You see the distinction?  Now it feels like government is going after them personally, not their guns.   Now you have a tribe, a community, fans.  You’re just like Apple, but you know, with guns instead of tech.  Sure you did it with blood and death instead of pretty and useful tech, but the end result is the same.  A group of people who support you no matter what you do.

The NRA is the root of this problem.  We can all point to all the hate and paranoia and exclusion and mental illness.  Those things exist and they should not be ignored.  But the reality is that those societal factors would never have culminated in the death of 49 humans if the NRA had not been actively campaigning to protect the right of a few people to have a hobby. The NRA is the linchpin to this problem.  Without it, the gun manufacturers could not lobby a sufficient amount of sympathetic support.

They ARE a morally bankrupt group that has no qualms about the blood they feed off of to gain their advantage.  The NRA has caused the death of more than 1000 people in just mass shootings.  That doesn’t include accidental deaths, suicides and individual murders with legally obtained weapons.

Do not apologize for them.  They used to lobby for better gun regulation.  They used to have a moral center that was about responsible gun ownership.  But now they don’t do that.  Now they have taken this completely explicable turn toward fighting any kind of rational regulation.  And the explanation is that:

Gun Sales are improved by controversy.

The NRA killed 49 people this past weekend and so many many more before that.  They are as responsible as cigarette companies are over lung cancer.  Possibly more.

Congress is a bigger problem than the President.  We tend to ignore the problem that is Congress.  Congressional elections tend to get less turnout.  Most voters cannot name all of their congressman, including myself most days.

We are far less likely to know where are our congressional rep stands on any particular issue and merely project onto them the position of their party.

We don’t know how they vote, we don’t know if they are merely shills for various businesses, we don’t know if we have accrued any benefit in our region because of their efforts.

We tend to think of Congress as a whole entity, divided into two sides, fighting a constant civil war.  But we don’t think much about the individuals who are supposed to be there working for our area in particular.

Congress is supposed to the factory where we generate the legislation and budgets that make this country run properly.  Congress is the CENTER of how things are supposed to get done.  But generally we perceive them as a clown car driving in circles with various unknown clowns forcing their way in or out of the vehicle.

Congressional Representation RARELY represents the actual population of the region.  This is because of gerrymandering, low voter turnout, and PRIMARILY – the two party system.

This country has divided every situation into some dichotomy based on a two party system.  And it’s insanity.  People are voting for a party and not an individual and that creates a problem, since it is the individual who goes to congress and votes. 

We assume that if we agree with some of a party’s position, we must endorse all of it.  Indeed we have no choice but to do so, because there is only the two choices and we have been led to believe its a zero sum game.   So people who have always voted for a party are still voting for it even when the party is saying and doing things they don’t personally agree with – because they agree with other things that the party represents.

So I propose the following:

a.  EVERYONE HAS TO VOTE.  No exceptions – you can go and abstain, but you have to go.

b.  For the House  – Larger districts and multiple representatives from each district.  See this video for explanation.  If you make the districts larger, and have more representatives, this allows for people with a minority viewpoint to get some representation in Congress.

For Senate – Increase the number to 4 senators from each state.

c.  Multiple Parties.  We need to have more parties to allow a more nuanced representation of views.

d. Single Transferable Vote.  Again – look at the video.  But this allows for more parties and a more representational congress.  You can vote in order of preference rather than voting defensively.

e.  Gerrymandering.  Politicians, Parties, Lobbies, etal cannot have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with the design of districts.  Period.  Nothing.  It needs to stop.  Non partisan committees must do this.

f.  Money -We need to get rid of the Super PACs and at least further regulate regular PACs.  We need to stop corporations and Rich People from giving more to a political campaign indirectly than any  average person can.  Basically we need to isolate this election to the money that is given directly to the candidate.  Also the party or a some lobbying group or the boy scouts cannot directly advertise for candidates.

I think it’s fine for a group to advocate for a particular policy as long as they did not link that ad directly or indirectly to the candidate or party.  So if a group is all excited about bathroom binary genders, that is the only thing they can say.  “lets police the bathrooms for genital sameness from birth.”  They cannot say the candidate’s name, party or have any logo, image or symbol that would link that issue to the candidate.

g.  ALL donations must be publicly announced on the candidate / congressperson’s website.  The donations are currently a publicly available thing – but not often acknowledged publicly by the candidate.  It needs to be out there.  

h.  Platforms – they need to published and discussed when they announce their candidacy.  Again – detailed policy must be expressed and at least two valid objections must be countered.

If they are up for RE-election, then their websites must contain both their voting history and their reasoning for the vote.

i.  Their fitness for the job must be declared.  No criminal backgrounds.  No tax problems.  No censures from any political body at any level of government.

Their experience must also be listed.  What is it that gives them the ability to sit in congress?

k.  Every election, the League of Women Voters publishes a wonderful summary of the voting options you have.  It is, sadly, not as well distributed as it needs to be.  I would propose that we need to make this sort of publication a REQUIREMENT and it needs to be delivered electronically or by paper to every person.

If you have some time, listen to this story from 99% Invisible.  Because my summary won’t do justice to it.

In Seattle they were going to build a new mall.  But one of the homeowners refused to sell.  Edith Macefield was in her 80s and she turned down first $750,000 and then $1,000,000 for her home, which was valued at about $120,000.

The news, quite naturally, loved this story and made Mrs. Macefield into an icon about blight of urbanization etc.  They projected their own agenda on to the story.  Mrs. Macefield mostly refused to speak to them, so they were free to make any story they wanted about it.

If this was a movie, the constructions guys would be the bad guys, but as it turns out, they liked Mrs. Macefield and the supervisor made friends with her.  They kept an eye on her, while they build the mall around her tiny little home.

In the end though, it turns out that Mrs. Macefield  wasn’t angry at the builders or at the way the world was changing. She was friendly with the construction workers.  She was just old and it was hard to change and hard to move around and she already knew where everything in her home was.  She had no family to leave it to, therefore the money was just irrelevant to her.  So, she didn’t move.

Its important to remember this.  Mrs. Macefield’s real story is different than the one projected on her by the news media, who told her story like it was David vs Goliath but with high minded ideals about over urbanization. And so the public of Seattle saw Mrs. Macefield entirely as something she wasn’t.

We view the stories of the world through the only lens we are provided.

And that lens is the news media we consume.  We are aware that we are seeing a skewed version of politics depending on which news channel we watch.  Aware of the distortion caused by which country’s news we are watching.  But less distinct is the everyday things we see as straight reporting.

No matter how its presented, the person writing/reporting a story is projecting their version of the story. That version may not be the same version someone else involved in the story would give.  Sometimes the fault lies in lack of information that gets filled in by the storyteller.  Sometimes the fault lies in innate views of the storyteller, which inform everything they see.

In any case, the actual events aren’t quite as they are being told.