I stepped out of public engagement for a while, then moved to Portland when I was ready to get back in. That was a whole new lesson: the lefty/progressive types are just as bad at governing. And the leftist/progressive voters are just as likely as the right to treat politics like a team sport. Portland is more dangerous for black people than Chicago now #BlackLivesMatter. Developers keep pulling out of affordable housing developments because of planning bullshit, and the city thinks its a good idea to mandate that contractors be women owned. Meanwhile, thousands are sleeping rough.

The politicians are awful, but in a democracy, the fault for that lies 100% with the people. Elected office, like next-door, doesn't make people bad; it simply reflects the rotten core of 21st century civil society.

Absolutely maddening is the lack of interest in concrete policy or actually using data to analyze changes and measure success.

I think I'm about ready to stop caring and have a nice life while my species hurtles towards the great filter. Life and the universe are meaningless anyway.

Democracy is a convenient way for the ruling class to hand-pick the people who are allowed to run for office and blame the voters for any bad results. There's research showing that there's very little correlation between the policy goals of the voting public and policy outcomes, but there's a strong correlation between policy goals of the ruling class and policy outcomes.

If you accept that there is such a thing as a 'ruling class', then presumably the only way to define them is 'the people who get their policy goals accomplished'. Because that's what 'ruling' means.

- in the top .1% of net worth

- in executive leadership positions

- attend elite universities

- frequently possessing generational wealth

I hope this helps.

Yes and no. Yes in that the politicians are selected from people they represent (in theory), but also no in that once a person becomes a politician, their incentives change and they are no longer representing the people that elected them.

Further, once in power, the systems can be "rigged" into maintaining that power (gerrymandering is an example of this). DJT couldn't become King of America without first becoming president. Once he became president, though, he definitely tried to rig the system to make him, effectively, King of America.

In moderation, I think this is actually the correct response. Unless you live in Missouri, who cares what stupid things the Governor of Missouri says?

In a previous era, you never would have heard about this story at all. It's just a politician in a minor state trying to score some political points. It's very unlikely they'll actually charge the reporter with anything, much less convince a jury to convict.

In today's connected world, it's easy to get news from anywhere at anytime and be outraged. Sometimes you just have to ignore it for your own sanity.

Because that person literally rules over millions of people, the overwhelming majority of which didn’t vote for him (1.7m votes out of the 6.1m population). Right now he is literally threatening state violence against a reporter for looking at a government website that accidentally leaked personal information.

Getting a prosecutor to risk their career on prosecuting a journalist for politics is quite a bit more difficult. Journalists are well aware of their rights, and have lawyers between them and law enforcement.

I think its dumb, but as a former photojournalist who had a very large oil company (Haliburton) use a very small police department to come after me for trespassing, I can assure you that the newsroom is NOT scared right now.

But that's what's got me so depressed over the past 5 years or so. It used to be, in the not too distant past, that politicians were embarrassed to be caught in an easily demonstrable lie or stupid gaffe.

These days they just yell "fake news", repeat the lie/gaffe louder and more frequently (which is EXACTLY what the governor is doing on Twitter [1]), perhaps maybe pair it with a catchy slogan, and that seems to be a winning strategy.

1. https://twitter.com/GovParsonMO/status/1448750830857904129

This is what we need to work on correcting. If a judge laughs your case out of court, there should be a severe penalty, especially if you're the government.

Hard disagree. If you're arguing that it's malice, and not stupidity, on the part of governor and others that put out this nonsense, then at least they are surely depending on the stupidity of their constituents at large for not laughing them out of office.

And to be clear, I'm not at all taking the position that people who don't have a deep depth of technology are stupid. But pretty much everyone in the US knows how to use a web browser these days, and believing people will buy the governor's completely lobotomized argument [1] is totally embarrassing, either for the governor or his constituents that elected him.

1. https://twitter.com/GovParsonMO/status/1448750830857904129

Basically, we are living inside a spaghetti mess of a civilisation.

But I’ve also spent twenty years working in various big balls o’ mud codebases, at companies that had big systematic problems that got them that way, and in that time I’ve found some strategies that can make positive changes, even under conditions of extreme chaos & status-obsessed executives. And they all start the same way:

Find a coworker, ask them how their work is going, and then really listen.

Don’t go in with any agenda except building a relationship with you coworker. If the have stuff they are proud of, tell them what you like about it. If they have stuff they are struggling with, you can commiserate. You might be able to help, but probably not: you are both living in a giant mess of a disaster world full of incentive systems that push people to behave the ways they are behaving.

But by setting that aside, by prioritizing your relationship with even just one other person over that perverse system that exists today, you are resisting. Authentic, caring conversations that prioritize people over process are radical acts.

Maybe the first person or the first dozen aren’t interested. That’s okay. Eventually you’ll have a second genuine conversation, and now you have two relationships. You can introduce those two people to each other, and suddenly you have a community.

A community can get things done none of us could do alone.

I learned these techniques from the grouchiest, grumpiest old grey beards I worked with, because they were how they built support for the infrastructure they wanted to use. I’ve use the technique for different purposes (livable code, low alert volumes, sufficient time & space to mentor junior engineers into being the mentors of junior engineers, not selling contracts to Palentir, more than two weeks vacation time, fixing user problems before adding shiny new whistles to get the PM promoted, not planning two years of work at once, etc), but fundamentally it is the same. Positive changes start with building a tiny little corner where we set aside our doubt, gather up our courage and build a community rooted in sufficiency and willing to trust.

I want to believe that, but after watching the Trump administration and how people seemed to embrace him more and more despite his continuing shameful acts, it's just hard to sustain belief that this all leads anywhere.

Sorry guys, not trying to be Debbie Downer here. I guess I'm just in a shitty mood today for some reason.

I'm with you 100%. I don't want to be there, but there I am. And sometimes it all feels utterly pointless – civilization, the human endeavour, everything. My particular slippery slope goes like this:

    Humanity is going to waste the one-time gift of fossil fuel accreting the already-grotesque hoards of a few hundred individuals. Then these people will die, nothing will have been gained on the whole, and instead of infrastructure which we could have used to pivot to some recognizable future, our descendants will be left with nothing but unrest and some variety of ecological hot potato. And then we will all die out or revert to a pre-technological state, and either way all the gains of science and human ingenuity will be lost.

I don't know what to do about all that, but usually I can convince myself that working on some tiny project to help things not go that way is a worthwhile effort. And of course it's pretty much all I can do.

Also here are a couple quotes that help me get out of such perspective ruts:

* "Even though I'm always in pain, it's worth sticking around to make my corner of the world a slightly better place." -Ricky Gervais' character from After Life

* "I cringe at my arrogance. Actually, cringing at my arrogance is just another, more rarified, level of arrogance." -Alison Bechdel

* "Goodness: You got to make it out of badness. Because there isn't anything else to make it out of." -Robert Penn Warren

No they aren't. Not even remotely close. I'm exhausted by "both sides". "Both sides" arguments cause apathy in people because what is even the point in voting if, "both sides".