I haven't written for a while, just been way to busy with other stuff. Its not that I haven't been listening or thinking about what's going on, but nothing that has been happening has led me to need to write. Some topics I have been considering writing about are:
1. Why are neither of these candidates really talking about the suspension of constitutional rights? Habeas Corpus? Patriot Act? Torture? Extraordinary Rendition? Yeah I've heard some superficial talk about these things but I don't think either of the candidates has really laid down the gauntlet and said they would purge these horrible Bush policies.
2. McCain has a clear misogynistic streak and the choice of his wife and Palin are evidence of it.
3. The psychological factors that lead one to be on the right vs. on the left. That is conservatives have an underlying paranoid personality - the belief that the world is a dangerous place from which you have to protect yourself. Liberals have an underlying depressive personality style that leads to feeling more responsible for the human condition and the fantasy that things can be better through human acts. These positions are not of course comprehensive and people land on a continuum, but they lead one to see the world in a very different ways and thus guide your positions on how the world works. There is also the way these two positions relate to authority. Of course the paranoid position tends to be suspicious and rejecting of authority in a fundamental way. The depressive position seeks for authority to do something about it all. Another factor in this who issue is that the paranoid position stems basically from fear and the depressive position stems more from resignation/helplessness. Again the repercussions for how you see the world and governmental policies are enormous. The other thing that one has to address when talking about psychological effects, and this goes largely ignored in media discussions about psychological issues, is that each position also has a paradoxical effect. That is, each position also in engenders fantasies about and wishes for a powerful authority that will swoop in and take care of everything for you. This is where we get the fantical fascist tendencies in the right wing and the socialistic/communistic tendencies on the left. What confuses these issues so much is that when either position becomes too extreme, the outcome becomes the same - the radical who seeks for government to leave them alone engenders a government that becomes all controlling.
4. I've have accepted that I am quite suspicious that electronic voting machines have been part of the election problem. In fact a relative of mine told me that when she voted in 2004, she knows she voted for Kerry but when she checked her vote the machine indicatd that she voted for Bush. This is just one incident and there have been reports of many others. It seems conceivable to me that if John McCain wins this election despite poll numbers still giving Obama a wide margin of victory up to election day and in exit polling, there could be some more significant social unrest than has been seen in the past. I say conceivable because US elections have been remarkably peaceful up until now. We'll see what happens. I need to make sure my passport is up to date!
5. I have always felt that despite the poll numbers it is likely that McCain will win because I have little faith in the American people to make the correct choices (they have not for decades). If you look at the polls the numbers for McCain are still around 43% - there is that number again that I talked about in RANT (see below). The 42, 43% number of Americans who are the ones who vote and are right wing. This is of course not the whole picture since only about half of the eligible voters vote in any given election. Who are the other 50%? They are the ones with learned helplessness, not caring or not believing that they have a say. I wonder if you polled these people what their positions would be or if they would have any at all. It seems that the Republicans are trying to disenfranchise voters while Democrats want to get them to vote - doesn't this indicate that these other 50% would lean the country to the left?
That's about it for now.
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