In three days, I'll be starting my quadrennial punishment by rewatching all of the most fantastical TV series to ever get seven full seasons on US broadcast TV: The West Wing. It's enjoyable in many senses, but simply not credible because everyone — even the (domestic) "bad guys" — believes in and struggles toward good government. Their differences are on policy or personality, or sometimes on method.
- I really wish that Leo's lament about the candidates on offer didn't reflect an improvement on the choices actually offered by the Внутрипартийные аппаратчики (regardless of Party label).1 That one side would deny the validity of any election it doesn't win, would impose precisely the kind of authoritarianism cloaked in high rhetoric claiming "superior civilization" against which the Colonies revolted in the eighteenth century only makes that party the greater evil. (Not just here, either.) One must remember, always, that when one chooses the lesser evil… one is still choosing evil.
- It's not only public office that has election problems. At that, this year's Hugos (the misconceived poll-tax-encumbered, egregiously mistimed election for "best" works and achievements in speculative fiction) are a considerable improvement over last year's. But these are just amateurs: They got caught.
- That's almost an improvement over overt, intentional abuse of dispute resolution systems. That abuse might be negotiated treaties. It might be improper filings in courts that don't have jurisdiction (and know it). It might be attempts to impose dead-hand control contrary to a century (or more) of skepticism. It might just be inordinate, inexcusable delay (that would be entirely unnecessary if the US treated health care as being an enabling right and not a paid-for privilege).
- Oh, that's all much too gloomy. How about some music, carefully preselected for you? Naturally, while managers are busy stealing from the "artists" who followed those rules. Meanwhile, major corporations have trouble counting to three (oops, that was mass-market fashion, not music).