No one ethical gets anywhere in government. The trick I think is to craft the offer a clever candidate will find hard to turn down.
People with great political instincts are natural predators. We--whoever "we" are--need to get a lot smarter in understanding that and turning those gifts of theirs to our own purposes.
I recognize I was a lot more gullible about politics than I believed myself to be and that's a hard lesson. I voted quite infrequently and even so regret every vote I ever took (except for the affirmative "none of the above" in the 2016 general).
I'm not and have never been and never will be a conservative. I'm not a libertarian, and though some of the Substackers I most respect are, and I expect in many things they're a lot smarter than I am, there are basic problems of society--of a big overgrown society like ours--that can't be decently managed via a libertarian perspective.
Sometimes we have to make partnerships and coalitions with people who may hold certain views we really despise but who otherwise really are interested in going in a direction we can tolerate. There are plenty of people I really like who happen to hold certain beliefs very deeply held and important to them that I happen to think are ridiculous. But *everyone* has a belief or accepts as plausible etc. etc. etc. something that someone else thinks is ridiculous. That's basic to human nature.
We need a lot less crusading and a lot more of "here's twenty things on which we can work together."
I've never liked putting people into boxes: liberals, conservatives, gay, straight, religious or not, etc. Most of us, regardless of our 'box' have a lot more similarities than differences. When you travel and interact with different people, you especially see this.
From all the substack writers and commentors I read and engage with, I get the impression we all want to have our basic human rights respected. This includes various freedoms that have been denied to us over the last few years, a peacefull existance, some semblance of fair play, a legal system and health care that work to a reasonable extent.
I've always voted, even when I didn't like my choices. Like you, I've probably, and at times certainly have, been somewhat gullible and naive. But I think there's more to it than 'just naive us'. At mid-60, I think we in the west grew up in a political system that we could to some extent trust at least to the point that it was not completely evil. Our political systems today are trending in the direction of evil, justified by certain expected end goals. A lot of our fellow citizens don't see that just yet, thus the trust in government/health/pharma bureaucracy.
What astonishes me over and over is how frequently we get these dreadful exposes of monstrous things our government in partnership with academia has done--regardless of which party is in power--and yet all the bright caring intellectuals, or ambitious lawyers, etc. etc., keep sending their kids to Harvard or Johns Hopkins etc. etc. etc. because what's a little torture, in the scheme of things? And that word *torture* covers such a range of activities it's just an amazingly capacious concept.
The population of Good Germans is just crowding out every other life form, it seems.
And this behavior is everywhere. Every single organized religious group has its sex abuse scandals. Nobody ever wants to really clean up their own cesspools. There's always this fantasy that, well, at least, say, the Buddhists don't do that! [Insert pet group as appropriate.]
By my own choice I lived overseas at various times over the course of my adulthood, and eventually I learned that it was better to live in America, regardless of all our flaws and failures, than to live anywhere else. I was fortunate to have already left NY when the Plague Era hit and to therefore have had only some performative nonsense (that I too supported in the beginning) inflicted on me. This has been a very educational era. But still not enough people have learned the correct lessons from it. We got a lot of work ahead of us.
No one ethical gets anywhere in government. The trick I think is to craft the offer a clever candidate will find hard to turn down.
People with great political instincts are natural predators. We--whoever "we" are--need to get a lot smarter in understanding that and turning those gifts of theirs to our own purposes.
Good point. I think we need to do a lot of brainstorming.
I recognize I was a lot more gullible about politics than I believed myself to be and that's a hard lesson. I voted quite infrequently and even so regret every vote I ever took (except for the affirmative "none of the above" in the 2016 general).
I'm not and have never been and never will be a conservative. I'm not a libertarian, and though some of the Substackers I most respect are, and I expect in many things they're a lot smarter than I am, there are basic problems of society--of a big overgrown society like ours--that can't be decently managed via a libertarian perspective.
Sometimes we have to make partnerships and coalitions with people who may hold certain views we really despise but who otherwise really are interested in going in a direction we can tolerate. There are plenty of people I really like who happen to hold certain beliefs very deeply held and important to them that I happen to think are ridiculous. But *everyone* has a belief or accepts as plausible etc. etc. etc. something that someone else thinks is ridiculous. That's basic to human nature.
We need a lot less crusading and a lot more of "here's twenty things on which we can work together."
I've never liked putting people into boxes: liberals, conservatives, gay, straight, religious or not, etc. Most of us, regardless of our 'box' have a lot more similarities than differences. When you travel and interact with different people, you especially see this.
From all the substack writers and commentors I read and engage with, I get the impression we all want to have our basic human rights respected. This includes various freedoms that have been denied to us over the last few years, a peacefull existance, some semblance of fair play, a legal system and health care that work to a reasonable extent.
I've always voted, even when I didn't like my choices. Like you, I've probably, and at times certainly have, been somewhat gullible and naive. But I think there's more to it than 'just naive us'. At mid-60, I think we in the west grew up in a political system that we could to some extent trust at least to the point that it was not completely evil. Our political systems today are trending in the direction of evil, justified by certain expected end goals. A lot of our fellow citizens don't see that just yet, thus the trust in government/health/pharma bureaucracy.
What astonishes me over and over is how frequently we get these dreadful exposes of monstrous things our government in partnership with academia has done--regardless of which party is in power--and yet all the bright caring intellectuals, or ambitious lawyers, etc. etc., keep sending their kids to Harvard or Johns Hopkins etc. etc. etc. because what's a little torture, in the scheme of things? And that word *torture* covers such a range of activities it's just an amazingly capacious concept.
The population of Good Germans is just crowding out every other life form, it seems.
And this behavior is everywhere. Every single organized religious group has its sex abuse scandals. Nobody ever wants to really clean up their own cesspools. There's always this fantasy that, well, at least, say, the Buddhists don't do that! [Insert pet group as appropriate.]
By my own choice I lived overseas at various times over the course of my adulthood, and eventually I learned that it was better to live in America, regardless of all our flaws and failures, than to live anywhere else. I was fortunate to have already left NY when the Plague Era hit and to therefore have had only some performative nonsense (that I too supported in the beginning) inflicted on me. This has been a very educational era. But still not enough people have learned the correct lessons from it. We got a lot of work ahead of us.