Tea Partiers' Irrational Obsession With Anti-Taxation and Anti-Immigration

If you aren't exactly sure what the United States tea party movement is about, this anonymous Arizona resident sums it up very well, as she told Ken Silverstein earlier this year:

"People who have swimming pools don’t need state parks. If you buy your books at Borders you don’t need libraries. If your kids are in private school, you don’t need K–12. The people here, or at least those who vote, don’t see the need for government. Since a lot of the population are not citizens, the message is that government exists to help the undeserving, so we shouldn’t have it at all. People think it’s OK to cut spending, because ESL is about people who refuse to assimilate and health care pays for illegals."

This is particularly important to remember today, as citizens here in elected new US senators such as Rand Paul in Kentucky (my state of residence) and Marco Rubio in Florida.  Silverstein observes the scenario in Arizona, very similar to ours here and in many others states:

"the state’s electoral system, which rewards extreme right-wing rhetoric, has allowed the political class to be as irresponsible and reckless as it likes. State residents seem content to cheer on the legislature for lowering their taxes—even as massive budget cuts pack their children into classrooms with more and more students, or force them to stand in line for a day to renew driver’s licenses at the gutted Department of Motor Vehicles. Arizonans will complain about their legislature—one recent poll showed that just 15 percent thought state lawmakers’ performance was “good”—but keep sending ever more radical Republicans to office. It is much like the Tea Party nationwide, which will, quite sensibly, demand political reform and protest the bank bailout, even as it backs hacks like Hayworth who represent the most corrupt wing of the G.O.P. "

Voting Considered Harmful

As the U.S. midterm elections approach in less than a week there are plenty of great reasons to go vote for one candidate over another.  But if in your particular district you can't find such compelling reasons for anyone on your ballet, and yet still hear so much "Get Out the Vote" style rhetoric aimed at increasing voter turnout, consider the harm such campaigns can do.  Particularly, when uninformed voters are manipulated into voting anyway, and then feel like that is their only participatory requirement until the next election.  Howard Zinn's response to the question, "Do you vote?" is instructive:

 I do. Sometimes, not always. It depends. But I believe that it is preferable sometimes to have one candidate rather another candidate, while you understand that that is not the solution. Sometimes the lesser evil is not so lesser, so you want to ignore that, and you either do not vote or vote for third party as a protest against the party system. Sometimes the difference between two candidates is an important one in the immediate sense, and then I believe trying to get somebody into office, who is a little better, who is less dangerous, is understandable. But never forgetting that no matter who gets into office, the crucial question is not who is in office, but what kind of social movement do you have. Because we have seen historically that if you have a powerful social movement, it doesn’t matter who is in office. Whoever is in office, they could be Republican or Democrat, if you have a powerful social movement, the person in office will have to yield, will have to in some ways respect the power of social movements.

We saw this in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was not the lesser evil, he was the greater evil, but in his administration the war was finally brought to an end, because he had to deal with the power of the anti-war movement as well as the power of the Vietnamese movement. I will vote, but always with a caution that voting is not crucial, and organizing is the important thing.

When some people ask me about voting, they would say will you support this candidate or that candidate? I say: “I will support this candidate for one minute that I am in the voting booth. At that moment I will support A versus B, but before I am going to the voting booth, and after I leave the voting booth, I am going to concentrate on organizing people and not organizing electoral campaign.”

The key message, for me, is that voting is fine, but not nearly the most important activity one can do in a participatory system.

But as I said there are important reasons to vote in many districts and we should be pragmatic with our own votes.  Noam Chomsky is quoted (though I can't find evidence he actually said it) on the similarities of the major parties yet how serious their slight differences can be:

Although there is not a lot of difference between the two parties, a lot of lives hang in the balance of that difference. Voting for what you perceive as the lesser of two evils is not very satisfying, but to abandon that responsibility to vote for the lesser of two evils is to turn your back on all those lives which hang in the balance.

ESR is the Worst of All Time

Occasionally people mention Eric S Raymond's "work" and they don't seem to feel the vitriolic hate toward him that I do.  I worry sometimes that the hate is dying and I want to keep it alive.  Luckily I found a post by Cal Harding titled "Why I hate Eric Raymond" that accurately summarizes up my feelings on ESR so I don't have to write them down myself (it is difficult because of the hate).  One of his many great points:

 Eric describes himself as one of the most significant figures in the history of free software.  In his own words, "Today I'm one of the half-dozen or so most influential people in that movement; in fact, a lot of people would put me among the top three, with Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman."

That's a very bold statement, and you would expect the person who makes it to be (in addition to an asshole) a talented coder who has authored software that can be listed alongside a kernel estimated to be worth $1.14 billion USD, or one of the most popular compilers on Earth.  However, probably Eric's primary contribution in the form of actual code is originally authoring the fetchmail utility: a mail client whose poor design and security holes have been criticized by, among others, one of my personal heroes, Daniel J. Bernstein.

More hubris: "I either founded or re-invented [...] the open source movement.  If that term means nothing to you, think Linux... "  I just love the subtle implication that Eric's actually had a direct and significant role in Linux development.  That's logic from the Steve Smith school of reasoning: "I've met Linus, Linus created Linux.  By the transitive property, I created Linux.  Algebra's awesome!"

In reality, though, Eric's main attempt at a contribution to the Linux kernel was in the form of CML2, a code configuration system, which was rejected by the kernel development team and the original CML was eventually replaced with LinuxKernelConf.  The possibility that it simply wasn't good enough being incomprehensible to him, Eric blamed the rejection on "politics." 

The only thing I'd add to Cal's statement is that I take ESR's act of "Fucking up the Jargon File" a bit personally since the original author was R. Finkel, the best professor of Computer Science I met while at the University of Kentucky.