let us cultivate our laundry

[eirias]

Something I really despise about modern American political culture: It's time-consuming. It's no longer enough to hold a political opinion and vote or spend money accordingly: now one must also attempt to hold it loudly, where congresspeople and corporations can hear. The chief problem with this is that it's difficult to be heard when everyone else is also yelling. It's an arms race of loud opinions and letter campaigns. Meanwhile, the laundry piles up.

Unfortunately, I am a stakeholder in this overhyped culture war, and so as appealing as sitting it out all Candide-style might be, I feel guilty and nervous if I do that, because next thing you know it'll be no birth control and no evolution in schools and church for everyone and "First they came for the Communists" and blah blah blah.

Really, it's about a sense of perspective, i.e., not having one. How creeped out should I be by the Dominionists? by prisoner abuse in Iraq? by the demise of the filibuster? by North Korea and their nukes? by fuckin' Dan LeMahieu and his crusade against university contraception? Well, I don't know, and guess what? I bet you don't, either. Y'all have a mean age somewhere near 30; and while a small handful have been more careful observers of politics than I and for longer, that's still not enough time to get a feel for, say, how to tell signs of a warning democratic apocalypse from signs that the leadership is too big for its britches and is going to get its ass whupped sometime within the next ten years. You don't get a lot of datapoints on "fascist takeovers of Western countries" these days. As for "fascist takeovers in Western countries in the Information Age and [fill in some other details of modern life I can't think of that might be salient factors in how the political landscape plays out]," yeah, I'm not seeing any datapoints there.

Everyone I know is pissed off and scared these days, when it comes to politics. Don't get me wrong; I'm feeling it too, believe me. But every so often I wonder, isn't this just a huge waste of time, in the end? Don't we have problems to solve and art to create and new countries to visit and music to listen to and things to learn? Isn't that going to give more satisfaction in the end than a whole bunch of inchoate yelling at people who only give a shit if you're giving them money, which you might not have anyway, having already given it away to the eleventh lobby group to come canvassing this week?

Comments

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

one being's tuppence: budget yer time.

yes, political stuff deserves your attention. no, you cannot give it enough attention (or time, or cash, or anything else) to make all that palpable a difference, and yes, you will go absolutely bugfuck if you measure your performance that way.

so you figure out what you can do, and do that. for me, it's one political act per week, and then i give myself peace about it. is it enough? i dunno. is it what i can do? for sure.

like gandhi said, whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

like gandhi said, whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is most important that you do it.

But the big question is, why is it important?

It's important to take stands on things that matter to you, I guess. But why is it urgent that they be in the public sphere? Why am I obliged to attempt to change the world through politics?

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

this is a quote of gandhi. obviously, it was in the public sphere that he worked; obviously it would be important to him that change take place there. your priorities may differ. except i get the feeling from posts like these that you are insufficiently navel-gazing for them to differ all that much.

besides which, you're not immune to the politics, and you're not stupid enough to imagine they'll leave you alone, nor self-centered enough to imagine that what happens to people who aren't you doesn't matter. oh well.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Are you obliged to?

I feel a strong commitment to making the world a better place. I have acted on this by becoming a teacher. I also act on this by riding the PMC. And some other, quiet stuff here and there.

I know that politics is an instrument I don't have the stomach for. I also know that this cuts me off from certain types of actions that I think are good. The question is, if you didn't do those things, would you be wrong? If so, you have to find a way to make your peace with politics, to figure out how to reconcile actions in the public sphere with both effectiveness and decency. If not, there is no particular need for your world-bettering actions to take place in that arena.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

so you figure out what you can do, and do that. for me, it's one political act per week, and then i give myself peace about it. is it enough? i dunno. is it what i can do? for sure.

I agree that this is a good sanity-preserving way to look at things. I have a few issues I care about, and I read up on them, write letters, donate money, etc., and I completely ignore the rest. This may not be the best thing to do, but it keeps me from drowning.

(The problem right now is the assault on reproductive rights is increasing, so I've been fired up and getting angrier over the past several months.)

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

Don't we have problems to solve and art to create and new countries to visit and music to listen to and things to learn?

yes, and a lot of us are trying to pay attention to that sort of stuff too, but it's kind of scary to wake up to NPR and wonder how long it'll be until i won't be able to solve the problems that i'm trying to solve (i.e. family planning care and access to contraception and/or abortion) or create the art that i may want to create or enjoy other people's art that they create (i.e. the high school kid who got in trouble for "threatening the school" with a story about zombies taking over a school). what happens if a friend of mine goes to visit another country, and isn't allowed back in? or when the music that i downloaded legally from an artist's website is no longer allowed to be played because it's electronic media, or i can no longer burn it to a cd to listen to in the car because all cd burning is pirating? i guess i'm scared because it's starting to feel like maybe the people in office do have their jobs long enough to fuck people over, and i don't know if there's anything i can do about it.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

In general, one way to gauge what's going on in this country is to look at it on a state-by-state basis. If some things aren't even passing in Alabama -- like the proposal to remove all gay-themed books from all public libraries -- then it's not going to pass in Wisconsin or New York or California. However, once evolution gets removed from the schools in Kansas, that suddenly opens the door in the rest of the states. So at the very least, that's a first check to see the likeliness of removing Oscar Wilde books from the library (low) or the likeliness of removing evolution from the schools (moderate).

Isn't that going to give more satisfaction in the end than a whole bunch of inchoate yelling at people who only give a shit if you're giving them money, which you might not have anyway, having already given it away to the eleventh lobby group to come canvassing this week?

One of the biggest problems for the left is the total lack of cohesion. After giving some money to the Sierra Club, I got mail from at least a dozen environmental organizations. How many big-time anti-abortion organizations are there?

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Taking a bit of a tangent on the evolution thing...

As a high school science teacher, I'll tell you right now that one of the major determining factors in what gets taught is the content of textbooks. The reason isn't really that the texts are strictly necessary, but they provide a lot of support mechanisms (e.g., homework problems) that the teacher needs to generate on his or her own otherwise.

What goes into textbooks is largely dictated by three states: California, Texas, and Florida. Not only because there are the most customers there, but (at least in Texas and Florida) the curriculum is set at the state level, and textbooks for the entire state are chosen by a group of political appointees in the state departments of education.

So when Texas says things like, "Our health textbooks MAY NOT use terms like 'domestic partner.' We want to see 'husband' and 'wife', or maybe 'spouse', at all times - anything more vague is a subtle promotion of the gay agenda," the publishers say "You got it, boss." Since it's more economical to print lots of copies of one textbook than fewer copies each of multiple, that's what gets distributed around the country. Thus, Texas is, in large part, dictating what gets taught nationwide.

Yikes. This is a major reason why I want to get involved in politics, at least to some extent. (Maybe the local school board or something.)

Anyhow, sorry for the somewhat off-topic rant - just hit a bit close to home. (And to the the article on textbook publishing I read recently with the health book example.)

[kirin]

Either that (a good reason for politics), or a good reason to break open the textbook industry. Like, say, move to electronic models where volume no longer matters. (Yes, that requires a lot of infrastructure, but hey, politicians seem to like to throw money at "technology in schools" initiatives...

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

The only issue there is that, at least at my school, I don't get to assume that every student has a computer at home. I can assume they can get to one given time (e.g. at the library), but for something like homework or regular studying, an electronic textbook is still a bit impractical.

[kirin]

Yeah; you'd either be reduced to buttloads of printouts (certainly not ideal) or you'd need school-issued notebook computers of some variety, which is still a bit expensive at this point on the techcurve, and would also require some seriously uber-ruggedized machines, depending on the grade level.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I cannot imagine what you mean by "an electronic model where volume no longer matters".

Writing a textbook is a spectacular undertaking (my father-in-law has written several; I've heard about this). It consumes your life for several years. And that's just the author -- it then consumes the lives of editors, of people responsible for getting photo permissions, reviewers...And these people have to be compensated. (And the photo permissions can be extremely expensive.) In short, it fundamentally takes a tremendous amount of time and money to produce a textbook, and moving it to an electronic model does not solve any of these problems.

[kirin]

You're right, of course, in that I'm vastly oversimplifying. It removes only publishing hurdles. One might hope, though, that it might give someone enough flexibility to publish something not necessarily tailored to CA, TX, or FL. I might be dreaming though.

Honestly, it's not inconceivable that you could amalgamate something of decent quality in an open-source manner. I'm sure it would then be a case of "good luck getting it approved by anybody", though.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I doubt it really works. I don't think that the major costs are in paper and distribution. The whole point of CA, TX, and FL is that you can't afford *not* to capture those markets; I doubt that going electronic reduces costs enough to change that. Even if it did...you're still going to want to capture those markets, because you can make more money from getting them than from not getting them.

Even at the college level, where my father-in-law's textbooks are chiefly used and where textbook adoption is driven at the university, not the state, level, people work hard and consider it a coup to be adopted at big schools with thousands of bio students. I gather the margins in this market are really quite small.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Would it work to write the textbook to one set of specs and then edit it to the specs of the other? Like leave out the chapter on evolution for the anti-evolution states? Just curious... I don't know if anyone would bother but I think it's worth asking, because that strikes me as the only real advantage of electronic stuff anyway - easier editing.

[darlox.livejournal.com]

Politics has always been a reactive medium for the majority. A very very small number of people will come up with a novel idea, which then polarizes the general populace. Joe in Kansas isn't thinking about evolution because he holds strong opinions on it - he's thinking about evolution because everyone around him is screaming "why don't you hold MY opinion on it????"

What I will posit here is that there isn't widespread dissatisfaction and anger at the political system. There is widespread dissatisfaction and anger among intellectual persons, who actually THINK about this stuff, and have the wherewithal to be fearful of consequences. Billy Ray in Louisiana couldn't give a damn until they "come for his guns." In general, that's not happening much these days. The politicians have finally figured out that they can easily and successfully play to the lowest common denominators instead of wrangling the power brokers. By any indication I can measure, the masses are HAPPY right now. I'll still point to the gay marriage issue as the bellweather here -- for widely varied reasons, virtually every non-uber-religious pundit was against the anti-marriage constitutional amendments, and it still passed, handily, in every state where it was on the ballot.

I'm about to sound like a total militia whacko here. I scare myself when I say this, and I really wish I could think my way out of this particular box. So, this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here it is anyhow:

What is going on now is the natural and unavoidable consequence of the "socially conscious" policies of the last 30 years. We, as Americans, have basically bred all of the personal responsiblity, sense of consequence, and to a large extent, intelligence, out of the American gene pool. Since WWII, each generation has accepted progressively less responsibility for their own actions, instead abrogating responsiblity to the government to make policies to keep us "safe".

Now, we live in a country where the numeric majority WANTS to be led around by the hand, told what to do, coddled day-in and day-out, and assured that their lot in life isn't their fault.

I'm not happy about it either, but if we, as individuals, were willing to let a lot of people live and die by their OWN mistakes, there would be a LOT less room for a governmental progression to fascism. Because nobody can take care of themselves anymore, the government can pretty much do whatever they darn well please.

Intellectuals DON'T want that level of intervention, and thus, we rebel. We're angry. We're tired. We feel like we're fighting a battle every day of our lives. The majority of our countrymen do NOT. In a democracy, they win.

[trygve.livejournal.com]

"First they came for the Communists"

Or in our case, as Singham points out (http://blog.case.edu/mxs24/2005/05/13/dominionists_and_gays), first they came for the gays.

[cognative.livejournal.com]

I have too many possible responses to create something coherent. I agree there's little chance one particular person can make all that palpable a difference. What's more liklely is that you can ecourage more people to become involved in some way. I think lack of participation is really the big problem. Getting more people to care and act about something (anything really) is more reasonable and I think more important in the long run.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I can really put my response to this suggestion into words (having totally failed with my response to lyonesse above, alas! - I'm just not good at expressing this idea).

On some level, obviously, the activists who push for more more more involvement more calls more letters more everything are right: like I said, in some ways, the loudest political constituency wins. And if the loudest people are ultraconservative Christians who think the only good agnostic is a dead and hellbound agnostic, well, I'm kind of fucked. I get that, I really do.

But the thing is, we do not operate in a vacuum. Louder voices on our side beget louder voices on their side; the louder we yell, the louder we are forced to yell later to drown out all the people who we have freaked the hell out of with our own voices. At some point, your voice just gives out.

It's not that there isn't merit in "bite off what you can chew and not more." That's an okay way to compromise, I guess, as far as it goes. It gives you peace and gets some small things done, so it's practical. But long range, it doesn't work. If you play the game, the game escalates. That's why I called it an arms race. There is no winning this game.

Which is why I wonder whether there is a way to avoid playing it without giving up the things I value. Shouldn't there be a way to substitute "smarter" for "louder"? I haven't thought of one yet, alas.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

It seems that the problem eirias was describing was, in some ways, the problem of too much participation in politics. Getting more people to participate, to act, does nothing to address this. The question is how do you get people to act in a different way; or how, within a climate where many people's political actions are noxious, do you act in a way that is effective but not also noxious, a way that has impact even if it doesn't have volume.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't think things are going strongly downhill... although this (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050509-4886.html?32982) has me worried. But mainly, what scares me is that it's staying the same, and that's not safe.

In the 1940s, the US locked away Japanese Americans in concentration camps solely because of their ethnicity, although they were US citizens. They did not lock up Germans or Italians, by the way. People don't generally talk about the US concentration camps, but we had them too. They weren't the death camps that the Nazis had, but they were concentration camps where citizens were locked up, had their possessions confiscated without any charge or trial or even pretense that they had done anything wrong.

We had slavery for a long time.

We gave the natives blankets that had been used by smallpox patients to deliberately kill them off.

We had the communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

Is everything going to hell in a handbasket? No. But we haven't left the handbasket yet. We've been a tyranny of oppression for centuries and we still are. It's not okay just because it's been this way for so long. There was some hope that we were finally changing, learning, improving - and perhaps we are. We're getting better about civil liberties for blacks and women. But we're not learning the overall lesson of being decent to people, and thus the US has never been safe. And we've aready, within this millenium, locked up people without charge or trial, condoned torture, etc.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Oh, but my main point, which I left out as usual, is that you don't know what would have helped or what would have been necessary until it is too late. Maybe everything will turn into people's worst nightmares, but if I end up in a prison or concentration camp, I at least want to know that I tried to prevent it, rather than sitting there and wondering if maybe if I had only done FOO...

And so many are known to be wrongfully imprisoned, some of them killed. It's just a matter of odds as to whether it'll happen to me. Plus the plethora of ilegal activities that shouldn't be crimes makes it dangerous to live here. Most people could be arrested for something if someone wanted to arrest them. Check out what percentage of Americans are in jail already. We're doing a whole lot wrong.

[cos]

The really big problem with American political culture, IMO, is the very simply (yet, to me, astounding) idea that most Americans have that "politics" is some separate sphere of life. Something you can choose to "do" or "not do". Something you can tune out of, so you can do other things, the "more important" ones you mention.

It's all politics.

For a Democracy to work, everyone must participate, as part of their normal everyday life. Politics is getting to know your neighbors, politics is the street cleaning schedule and parking tickets, politics is whether your independent theater gets closed, politics is what the rents are, and who's being forced out of the neighborhood, it's what kinds of businesses are walking distance from you, and whether or not there's a bus, or a bike path, and how much the bus costs, and which neighborhoods it connects to, politics is how well you know what species of birds and trees are in your town and which species are invasive and who pays to find that stuff out and how they do it, politics is the farmers' market and the farms and the trucks that bring the food, politics whether you know when the police arrested someone a few blocks away because they were poor, and whether they know the same thing happened a few weeks earlier, so people can talk to each other about it, politics is whether your electric utility is reliable or not and what's in the water you drink and who figures out what is in it, politics is how many people around you get sick and how to keep the rodents from spreading disease and how much risk you're at...

None of it is a waste of time. Forget about yelling. You win if and only if you participate. What you write and read, the debates you have, that may or may not be a way for you to learn. If it's not a very effective way for you to learn, find some other way. That's not the point. The point is to participate.

Most Americans do not participate. Most Americans think politics is optional. That's why we've been coasting along, and we're lucky to have coasted along for a few decades without major damage, but it just kept us from realizing the depths of the malaise. The malaise is deep and well rooted not. And the malaise is the simple concept that some things are "politics", most other things are not, and you can decide whether to "do politics" or not, and when.

Don't we have...

[cos]

... art to create

My friend Bill put himself through Brandeis working as a street performer in Harvard Square. His act was heavy on fire-juggling. He stopped performing there about halfway through senior year, because the city changed the permit system for street performing in Harvard Square, such that he could no longer fire-juggle there (I think he could with a more expensive permit but there weren't enough of those available).

Every year, Somerville Open Studios draws tens of thousands of people to Somerville for a weekend of wandering around visiting over 150 artists' studios in Somerville. Prints, painting, sculpture, glass, film, a painted temple, it's quite wonderful and amazing. The city makes street parking open for non-residents all weekend, gives each studio orange balloons to tie on the street in front of their house so there's a consistent way to identify which doors to go in, and publishes a free walking/driving map of the city with all the studio locations marked and a guide to who's where. Artists in Somerville get increased visibility, customers, learn about each other, and the culture and community of making art in Somerville flourishes more because of it.

Cambridge doesn't have an Open Studios weekend like that. I'd like us to.

A year or two ago, the MBTA changed the rules for buskers in subway stations, in ways that particularly affected musicians. There was a lot of public debate, and even though more restrictive rules did go into effect, they were better than what would have happened if people weren't paying attention. It's harder for a lot of performers to meet the requirements and get a permit now than it was, but we still have some musicians in the subway stations.

The Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was full of artists' lofts in the 90s, mostly converted warehouse spaces in a once-poor neighborhood that drew artists to move in. Because they moved in and made the neighborhood trendy, real estate values went up and rents went up, and landlords started converting their warehouse spaces into apartments (or condos). A lot of artists can't afford to live there anymore, and have moved out, but it's hard to duplicate the kind of collaborative communities you get when a bunch of people share a converted warehouse space. I hear that in the Netherlands, the government specifically dedicates some spaces like that for the artists that squatted in them after they were initially abandoned by owners, so when the artists make the area desirable again, they get to stay.

... and new countries to visit

Thanks to 9/11-induced paranoia, the US started imposing onerous immigration requirements on people from a variety of countries. Some of those countries have started retaliating. For example, I hear Brazil now requires that Americans wishing to visit Brazil come to their nearest consulate in person to get fingerprinted and apply. That's annoying enough if one lives in a city like Boston, that has a consulate, but what about people who live up in Augusta? They have to find somewhere to stay in Boston overnight just to apply for a visa. Unfortunately, you need to buy your round trip tickets first, to show to the consulate, in order to apply - so if they deny you, or delay it, you may be out the price of the tickets.

Don't we have... (2)

[cos]

... and music to listen to

It used to be that a band could build up an audience locally, and become a "local hit". Radio stations in the band's city would start playing them, people would get to know the band from hearing them on the radio, their sales would go up, and sometimes it might lead to them "breaking out" and becoming regionally successful, or even nationally. That wasn't just a good way of developing a "pool" of potential new national bands, but also a way the variety and richness of each city and region's music scene was developed and nourished.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to a sweeping wave of radio industry consolidations. Media companies went from owning 5 or 10 radio stations, to owning hundreds (or, in the case of Clear Channel and Infiniti, over 1,000). This kind of consolidation made a lot of business sense for them, because they could cut costs by eliminating local station studios, staffs, and authorities. Centralized programs, playlists, and satellite distribution took over. The feeder system for new music inverted, in just a few years, from bottom-up to top-down. Because each band must start nationally in order to get radio play normally, the entire process is controlled by a few big companies, who mostly choose music they think is likely to make a lot of money: in other words, music that sounds a lot like whatever else most recently made a lot of money. The old entry path for a local band to get into the system was closed off. This meant far less opportunity for bands to get their music out to people, or to make money to support their music-making habit, and a much narrower, blander field of music in our lives.

By the late 90s, a new entry path started to form: the Internet. In the first few years of the new century, this entry path has proven that it can allow bands to circumvent the corporate system, get interesting music to people around the country, and give us variety. The legality of this, the methods that it will and will not be allowed, the economic models that will either let it thrive or keep it shoved on the edges - all of this is being decided by legislatures and courts today.

... and things to learn?

Brazilian biologist Dr. Vera Reis was invited to Woods Hole Research Center in MA, part of the collaborative Large-Scare Biosphere Experiment in Amazonia, supported by NASA. Unfortunately for Dr. Reis, she happened to have a brief conversation at the airport in Rio, with a young woman who may have been trying to enter the US illegally. When Dr. Reis arrived at Logan airport, she was detained and threatened. They told her they "knew everything" about the smuggling plot, and refused to look at the documentation she had showing that she was a biologist with a Ph.D. and an invitation from Dr. Foster Brown at Woods Hole. They forced her to sign a document she did not understand, without an interpreter, cancelled her visa, and sent her on back to Brazil - all while Dr. Brown was waiting for her at the airport, making phone calls, and not being told what was going on.

A section of the USA PATRIOT Act allows the government to subpoena library, bookstore, video rental, and similar records, without showing probably cause or even any evidence to a judge that it is related to an investigation. Libraries and stores are not allowed to inform patrons when this has happened. I still operate under my acquired white middle-class sense of security, safety, and optimism. But many, many people are afraid to read certain books or watch certain videos, because they don't want to give the government a reason to suspect them - and rightly so. Many immigrants, even legal permanent residents, have been deported back to countries where they are in danger, for reasons nobody knows.

I'm barely scratching the surface.

To the extent that you operate under the belief that anything in your life that is important to you is somehow "not politics", you cede control over your life to the relatively small number of people who understand that it is all politics.

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I don't think eirias was in need of issues to care about; in my observation, there are a lot of issues she cares about which have obvious political implications. As I read it, there are two key points in here:

1) Many of the people whom politics seems to attract and/or reward are assholes: people who like to win by yelling the loudest and stomping on other people. eirias values not being an asshole (for which we all love her ;), and, while concerned about various political issues, wants a way to be politically involved which does not necessitate being an asshole, yet is still effective (since there really isn't a point to participating unless you think you will have an effect).

2) One of the complicating factors is that -- since our experiences in life are necessarily brief and eirias and people she knows well have not generally lived through the larger political upheavals of human history -- it's very hard to tell what the stakes are. There are stakes that are worth getting out there and yelling until other people shut up, if that's the only effective tool, but are these those stakes? How can you tell in the absence of good comparative data? And what's the margin for error -- if we disengage and do other worthwhile things with our time, that works out just fine if the stakes weren't all that high, but pretty badly if they were, so how much is it OK to be wrong in guessing what the stakes are? And how, again in the absence of good comparative data from personal or vicarious experience, can we get better at judging the stakes, the outcomes?

You've offered examples which might influence eirias's judgment of the stakes, but I don't think you've addressed the points that I think she was actually making.

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thank you for getting it :).

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[cos]

I can't quite agree or disagree, I just think you entirely missed my point - which is in the first of my three comments. Both E's post and your comment here, come from the perspective of politics as separable from life, rather than the one I think is more productive: politics as an aspect of everything that everyone does all the time.

You say things like "the people whom politics seems to attract", and "do other worthwhile things with out time", for example. These concepts only apply if you have the point of view that I described, the one that I think is the source of American political malaise: that politics is some separable sphere of life that you can choose to participate in or not, and when and when not to. That some things are "doing politics" and others are not.

So yes, I think you've pinned down exactly what she meant. You got it perfectly. And it is different from what I'm talking about, you're right about that. Do you also see my point of view, and why I responded the way I did? It's hard for me to get across, given how deeply ingrained in American culture this IMO-dysfunctional concept of "politics" is rooted.

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I see your point of view; it's just that it doesn't address her point of view unless you happen to persuade her to share your point of view. (To which end, in fact, you did adduce a lot of examples.) And, even then, it doesn't resolve the problems she brings up -- that traditional politics is full of jerks but it's hard to gauge the effectiveness of nontraditional politics; that it's difficult to determine the stakes without a broad and usually personal historical perspective. So it looks to me like you're talking past her, evangelizing your own concerns more than engaging with hers.

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[cos]

it's just that it doesn't address her point of view unless you happen to persuade her to share your point of view.

That is, in fact, what I want to do. I think the concerns she brought up are ones that only make sense if you think of politics as separable, and that in and of itself is the actual problem.

What does it mean to say that "politics is full of jerks", for example, if you understand politics to be an aspect of everything that everyone does all the time? It means nothing more than "life is full of jerks". So, whatever. It's not relevant to a discussion of politics anymore.

I'm only talking past her until she understands what I'm saying. If she does understand (and I hope she chimes in), then I'm trying to tell her why I think the concerns she brought up are misplaced, and based on an unproductive view of what politics is. By "misplaced" I don't mean wrong - they're interesting things to talk about in their own right, I'm just saying they're not useful ways to think about the worth of political participation.

(I don't know what you mean by "traditional politics" and "nontraditional politics".)

Re: Don't we have... (2)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Your point seems to be that everything is politically relevant. Everything we value depends in some sense on the acquiescence of the public, it's true, whether it's a desire for increased public spending in one area or a desire for decreased public intrusion in another. Your point is that to follow the advice of Voltaire and cultivate your garden may work today but tomorrow you might wake up to find the county went all eminent domain on your ass and built a strip mall in your tomato patch. I concede that point (and in fact was my point in paragraph 2 of my original post). I maintain that there may nevertheless be some virtue in rising above the fray, but it is probably the kind of virtue that requires a naked ascetic (http://blog.case.edu/mxs24/2005/04/05/the_four_stages_of_life_stage_3_a_retirement) to truly appreciate, and I am not sure that I possess that sort of virtue.

But "it's all politics" is too vague by half, because while politics may affect the range of actions I may choose to take, not every action I might choose will have a meaningful effect in the political sphere, by which I mean the government sphere or even the public sphere. Politics might, in an extreme case, affect whether or not I continue to breathe; but whether or not I continue to breathe has little to no effect on politics. If you contest this point and you see, for instance, a way I can make ensure access to effective contraception merely by continuing to breathe, I am all for it ;).

Given this, I think it is totally fair for me to wonder whether my participation in politics - in the sense of choosing actions based on their potential to affect the actions of decision-making bodies, whose ability to affect my actions in turn is uncontested - is worthwhile. The reason I say this is that paths of action I see which seem to have relevance to the public sphere are few in number and small in scope. Most of them involve vocalizing my opinions on a matter to some subset of {government agents; corporate agents; newspapers; random passersby}. The problem with vocalizing one's opinion is that one does not speak in a vacuum. I don't get why you seem to have missed this point. Either my representatives to a decision-making body have their own opinions which mine will not sway; or they do not have their own opinions and will merely do whatever is politically expedient, that is, whatever will please the largest number of their constituents. If I step it up with the letter writing, surely someone who opposes me will notice and compensate. This I glean from the fact that just about every activist email I receive makes quite sure to inform us that are flooding the office of the Foobar with letters and calls, and we can't let them have the last word, can we?

Summed up: stating my views affects the game, but it does so in a way I find counterproductive.

Thinking about this, your failure to follow this point may mean that something has escaped your notice. In my observation, most participants in public debate are less interested in learning than they are in persuading. When it comes to issues I actually care about, I am no different. I only care about the reasons John Smith opposes birth control insofar as learning about them gives me a weapon of conversion. This makes me, like my closed-minded brethren, completely useless in the political sphere. Unfortunately, most of said useless people do not have the good grace to shut up and talk about tomatoes instead.