Just Putting This On The Record: Yes, We Could Still Fail
It’s easy to see what I thought back in 2004, when the only public face I had was LJ. You can see all my posts running up to the election (and the scathing condemnation I eventually uncorked after Kerry lost), and as such I’m pretty on the record of what I thought, going in. Before I posted yesterday’s plea to Republicans, I went back and looked over my October posts to ensure that yes, I was pretty positive Kerry was on the losing side.
Today, however, I’m scattered all over – I make maybe one blog post a day on average, and most of my updates are on Twitter, which is like throwing confetti into the wind. There’s no history to it. And so, just to immortalize myself here, let me say this:
We could still fail big-time.
Look, it’s not that I thought Obama was my superhero savior, ready to erase our debt and heal our boo-boos with the might of his Presidential kissyface – it’s that presented with two options, I thought Obama was more fiscally responsible than Romney. (Mainly because Romney never actually bothered to get into the details of what he’d cut.) If there had been a choice who I thought was better than Obama (and who could potentially win), I would have enthusiastically voted for him.
But I think there’s a very real possibility that even Obama can’t pull this off. The Republicans are all like ZOMG IT’S NOW OVER and WE’RE GOING TO DEFAULT and SAY HELLO TO OUR NEW POSITION AS GREECE, and I think that maybe we will wind up in an even worse economic meltdown. Part of that is because the Republicans are horrifically intractable (filibuster what?), and as such I don’t know whether Obama can hammer out a compromise, and part of that is that I think Obama’s slightly more likely to cut than Romney (as Republicans, despite their rep as fiscally responsible, spend like sailors whenever war comes a-knocking). But I viewed “a potential compromise” as way better than “Romney’s tactics unleashed.”
So many Republicans are framing the issue as “Oh, you think Obama will fix it all! You’re so naive!” No. I think of Obama the way I think of an experimental drug treatment; hopefully, it’ll work. It’s better than the side effects of the other drugs suggested. But none of this is a sure-shot guarantee of success, and if it all fails, then I’m confident I’ve made the best choice of the ones I had available, with the information I had at the time.
So if things do go South, here it is: I wasn’t 100% positive about Obama. Maybe, like, 70%. But that was better than the 25% confidence I had in Romney.
A Fascinating Thought That Maybe I Didn't Write
My pal Bart Calendar is a professional ad-writer, and as such you might as well call him a professional chameleon. When he has to figure out how to market something, he’s gotta speak to his audience in their voice.
As such, he’d said to me that he’d love to write an entry in “my” voice, publish it here, and see if anyone notices the difference.
I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but I don’t plan this journal all that much; I get up, see what’s tickling the ol’ blog-bone this morning – that sounded worse than I meant it – and whatever I felt like comes spilling out. I allow half an hour for bloggery; sometimes I go over, sometimes I don’t. And I’d need advance approval on the imitation-post, because it would have to be something I believed; I feel like it’d be a betrayal of my audience, having a post in my name that espoused an idea I actually thought was foolish.
Still. Assuming the content wasn’t too controversial, I wonder if you’d know. Bart’s good. Even if I’ve told you, I wonder if you could tell the difference. I don’t think you could.
It would be the most audacious thing Bart had ever done, however, if he wrote this entry and this one was the imitation, though, wouldn’t it?
The Best Video You're Gonna See Today (If You're A Blogger)
Okay. So Shelley Dankert was a conservative blogger, drunk on buttershots during election night.
She decided to YouTube what was an EPIC FUCKING RANT, berating her friends for not sharing her YouTube videos enough. The rant is twenty-four minutes long, and frankly, I’d probably watch her in a different sitcom every week, a tiny blogger furious that nobody is paying attention to her. It’s a little close to the bone, but I love it.
Alas, she’s disallowed embedding, probably because she desperately needs the hits on YouTube. Anyway, watch the first four minutes, at least. Yes, the screen is black, mostly. Part of the charm, really.
“I can make fifteen fucking posts on Facebook, and not fucking one of you will share it!”
If You're Surprised By The Election Results, You're The Reason You Lost, Or: A Plea For Useful Republicans
Dear Republicans:
I know the despair you feel this morning, and sympathize, because I’ve been there. In 2004 my stiff, robotic millionaire lost to a President he should have soundly thumped, and I was so hurt I took a week off from the Internet afterwards. I am completely sympathetic with that slow terror that the country is now in the hands of an incompetent, and the voters don’t even know it.
But I noticed a weird difference between the way Republicans and Democrats reacted to a losing candidate. In 2004, when the polls turned against Kerry and it was obvious he was going to lose, the Democrats asked “How can we fix that?” Oh, they asked in their glum, incompetent way, but when I personally talked to other Democrats both in real life and online, we were all pretty cognizant of the fact that Kerry was the underdog.
The Republicans of 2012, however, became increasingly convinced that Romney was going to win.
Everywhere I looked on Twitter and Facebook, I saw my Republican friends – not straw men, but actual people – talking about how terrible Nate Silver’s methods were, how these Rasmussen polls showed Romney’s real strength, and eventually you got the travesty of UnSkewedPolls.com, which cherry-picked the data and even today has their prediction of not just a Romney win but a landslide, Romney 311 to Obama 227. (Actual result: Obama 332, Romney 206.)
It all crystallized for me when my friend Brad Torgerson said, “Liberals and Democrats have Nate Silver and his 538 blog. Conservatives and Republicans have the U of CO guys. It’s an epic cage match of predictive numbers geekery!”
Look there. Right at that post – one not too dissimilar from a thousand other dismissals of Nate Silver and the other aggregated polls. See what Brad did there? The way the guy bringing you news he didn’t like was automatically assigned a partisan bias, and the only rational solution was to get a guy on your side with better numbers? As if reality was merely a function of getting enough guys on your side?
That’s why you lost.
Stop confusing hard reality for partisan opposition.
It’s time to step out of the bubble, dear Republicans, because we fucking need you. I don’t trust the Democratic party to run the country single-handedly. I want a Republican party I can rely on for real solutions – and you’ve become lazy, voodoo-like, dismissing any data you don’t like as partisan opposition.
Jay Lake is fond of saying, “Reality has a liberal bias.” That’s not because reality inevitably verifies liberal thinking, but because the Republican response to anything that challenges them is now to write off the data.
And let me repeat: we need you. I want a counterweight to Democratic power, not a deadweight that refuses to acknowledge the issues. I want a Republican party that will look at the numbers for climate change and not go, “I don’t like what those scientists are saying, so I’ll call it a silly liberal bias!” but say , “We’re business experts, we know how to motivate rich people to do what we want, how do we fix this?” I want a Republican party that will realize while yes, we’re spending far too much and should cut down, the results of thirty years of trickle-down theory and tax cuts won’t actually provide enough revenue, because we are at the lowest effective tax rates we’ve had in thirty years.
And yes, you can argue all my statements here. But in that, smart person, you’re like a driver with an SUV in Alaska. A person with a car in Alaska is going to get stuck in the snow eventually; that’s a fact. But if you have an SUV, you’re gonna get stuck way the heck out in the woods where no one can get at you, because you have the strength to do it and won’t stop when common sense tells you to. I had a ton of Very Smart friends dissecting all the reasons why Nate Silver was wrong, why his methodology sucked, why these pollsters who said what they liked over here had better ways of slicing the data… and all that flurry of so-called “facts” amounted to was an elaborate justification of personal biases that had no basis in reality.
It’s time to stop fighting the obvious. It’s time to stop assuming that anyone who presents contradictory data is out to get you.
You should have won, guys. You had a President with an economy in the doldrums, a guy who’d lost a lot of his electoral mojo in the realities of politics. But instead of rising from the grave, you chose a candidate who never actually gave us firm numbers on what expenses he’d cut to fix the economy. You chose a candidate who said he’d get rid of Obamacare, but never actually named the parts he’d destroy. You chose someone who, though all politicians lie, lied a lot more than almost any modern Presidential candidate.
You had a guy who should have sliced Obama to ribbons – and he lost, in large part, because he said, “Trust me” instead of giving us a plan. And you let him get away with it.
You let him get away with it because you’re indulging in a great deal of magical thinking. You let him get away with it because facts have ceased to matter; as long as someone tells you something you want to hear, you’ll find a way to justify it with pseudo-science and trust and spit and baling wire. You don’t like to hear how bad a candidate Mitt was, because you came so close this year, but it’s true; the problem is that so much of the country has abandoned listening to reality that you can get massive votes and never touch a fact.
If you can’t be honest today, in the aftermath of this great defeat, then you’re never going to see the truth.
If you seriously thought that Romney had a good chance of winning, then you’re part of the problem. Wake up. I implore you: learn from this. Look at your deepest beliefs, and see whether the numbers support them. Start thinking, maybe those people with data I don’t like are right.
If you think the lesson to be learned is “We weren’t conservative enough,” then you’re handing me a great victory in 2016. I want to have a real choice then.
Love,
T.F.
You Got Your Monogamy In My Poly, Or: My Awful Corrosion
One of the reasons monogamy is so damned pervasive is that you can win at monogamy. Every relationship in a monogamous setting has the goal baked right in: Date. Get engaged. Move in together. Marry. Don’t cheat. Die.
…aaaaand you’ve won at monogamy! Collect your prize from the funeral director in the form of happy signs from your mourners. They’ll all praise your legendary love. Fifty years together and they were still holding hands on their deathbed? My God, how inspiring.
Me being stupid, I ported that ideology straight into my poly, a subtle corrosion I didn’t notice until about six months ago.
Polyamory’s got a lot of overlap with monogamy, because like Soylent Green, both are made of people. But once you remove that core assumption that “exclusive sex is what defines us,” then everything else gets kicked strangely, bizarrely, up for play. How are you supposed to have children? Can you hold hands with your lover in public? How does the insurance work?
After a while in polyamory, you start to feel exactly how many aspects in a relationship are actually not fundaments, but rather questions that we assume don’t need to be negotiated. And those unquestioned assumptions are like poisons, leaking into the ground water – a subtle corrosion that can harm you in small ways over time.
My corrosion was approaching long-term poly relationships as though they were monogamous.
Here’s the secret truth of poly: it allows you to successfully date people you could never marry. You see the pressures of the Great Monogamous Victory crushing otherwise-happy relationships: I think we all know a couple who got along just fine as long as they had separate apartments and just had fun going to movies , but the moment they moved in together they devoured each other. But that monogamy train, man, it keeps on moving; if you’ve been dating casually for a while, well, eventually you gotta Get Serious.
Getting Serious involves stepping right in the lion cage with their worst faults. Does she have a temper? Well, as her boyfriend, you’re gonna be called on to calm her down when she starts getting angry, or at least to stand support as she breathes vitriol upon whatever’s pissing her off. Is he lazy? Well, you’re the one who’s going to be trying to pay the bills while his unemployed ass spends the weekend in his underwear playing Halo 4.
Getting Serious means you become, to a large extent, your lover’s primary therapist, because you’re with them 24/7 and you have to learn to deal with all of their moods. You might find his jealousy exasperating, but you can’t really walk away – as the primary, your responsibility to either defuse, reassure, or route around it. And I know, I know, it doesn’t necessarily have to work like that – but for most of functioning monogamy, if you’re relying on someone else to satisfy your emotional needs, and that someone is someone you can be sexually attracted to, then Bad Things are gonna creep in around the edges.
But with poly, if you hate the way your lover spends her weekends doing nothing but playing Borderlands 2, you can designate that as Not Your Problem. That laziness does not mean she is a bad person; it means there are certain circumstances under which you shouldn’t be hanging out. You don’t have to merge your lives. You can go on dates when your slothful partner feels like rousting themselves, and leave them to their own devices the rest of the time.
In other words, you can maintain light sexual relationships for as long as you’re comfortable with them. You don’t have to take it to the next level. There is no next level. There’s only what you want to have – and if that involves wanting to deal with her temper, then you can do that, too.
Now. The problem I made was approaching every poly relationship as if they were all going to reach Gini’s level.
My wife is my primary partner, but that term is so weaksauce when it comes to what Gini and I have. We fit together in every way that really matters, having spent thirteen years in the Pit Of Monogamy wrestling with each other’s issues… and we’ve been victorious because, over time, we’ve come to implicitly trust in each other’s good will. Which is not to say that Gini doesn’t knife me in the heart occasionally, but when she does I know that there’s no malice in it. She’s spent so much time trying to be kind and courteous and respectful of me that any bruises I get must, logically, be by accident.
Gini is the great love of my life.
Every woman I date, then, must therefore be on the path to become a similarly great love.
And the problem is that when you uncork that kind of sweeping romance at someone, it’s hard to say no; I’m passionate and poetic, so when I’d mutter yes, we’re meant to be together in their ears, they’d reply yes, this is special, it’s so amazing, isn’t it? And we’d start dating, and subconsciously what I’d be trying to do was groom them to be as intense and critical in my life as Gini is. Because hey, Gini was the best thing in my life, and therefore all paths must lead to something very like Gini.
But that’s the Monogamous Victory speaking. I’d swapped out “Get married, die” for “Have someone else as wonderful for me as Gini is,” but the victory condition was there all the same. And as such, I had to Get Serious with every woman I dated, as soon as possible, or I was losing.
Which led to tons of dysfunction. When we had a disagreement, it was critical not just to resolve the disagreement, but to approach this as a primary relationship and to ask all the followup questions that sprung from that: why did you think that poorly of me? What assumptions were we both making that led to this? Do you understand how exactly that hurt, and why, and grasp every reason why you must never do that again?
I believe in open communication. But there are also times when too much communication can smother a relationship. And all the while, I was having these Great Loves that I thought were the Next Big Thing, each of which evaporated in less than a year. And my poor, poor partners had to deal with a string of ridiculous NRE, followed by ridiculously strained conversations as I tried to turn what was a pretty good LDR into ZOMG THIS MUST BE CRITICAL TO OUR LIVES TOGETHER FOREVER.
Which is ridiculous. Gini is the best thing that ever happened to me, a lucky lightning strike, and cultivating every relationship as though eternal beauty was the goal led to, ironically, premature collapse. If I’d just been able to go, “Hey, that’s pretty cool, can we have a good time when we’re together?” I’d probably still be dating half of them. As it was, I was inadvertently slighting Gini (as if every relationship could become what we had made!) and applying a constant, hideous pressure to relationships that didn’t need them.
They crumbled. As they must.
But that’s the thing about poly: you have so many opinions that you’ve inhaled from monogamy, unwittingly taking it into your system, that you don’t realize how it’s affecting your life. For me, I carried this subliminal concern that every relationship had to go somewhere. But they don’t. Sometimes, they can just be what they are, hanging about. Stasis is not necessarily a bad thing, in polyamory.
Relationships are not Pokemon, man. They don’t need to evolve.
Why I Write About Polyamory, And The Dangers Therein
I was talking to a friend the other day, and she thanked me for blogging openly about my polyamorous relationships.
“I started reading your relationship essays not long after I started dating seriously,” she told me. “I was a late bloomer, and reading them helped me short-circuit some of the stupidity I might have had. Instead, I got to make completely different mistakes. It’s like having a huge ‘include’ statement in the process of What Not To Do.”
“So I’m like a programming library,” I said.
“A very nice and eloquent library,” she agreed.
I don’t know if the comparison is really true – I think my library’s a little bloated and redundant – but that is why I write about polyamory and relationships in general: I make the mistakes so you don’t have to.
I’m not wise. I have made, and continue to make, a lot of insanely stupid mistakes. I say hurtful things, ignore signs I shouldn’t, destroy my lovers. And when I’m standing among the wreckage of my own idiocy, often my sole consolation is, maybe I can stop someone else from doing that. So I write that up, in the hopes that at least one person will learn from what I did.
And I‘m still making those mistakes. I often joke that I have three hobbies – polyamory, programming, and writing – and all three put me in touch with my dysfunctional past. I’ll be upgrading some piece of code on StarCityGames.com and think, “What idiot wrote this inefficient, buggy code?” And then I’ll go, “Oh, that was me,” and take a quiet moment to meditate on what an idiot I was four years ago, and how much better I am now, and how the code I’m writing now will look like complete shit to the me of four years in the future.
What you see in my blog? Is not the total of who I am. It is, instead, a total of the lessons learned. And I fuck up in monstrous ways that don’t necessarily teach me anything new, and opening up those mistakes to the public would just humiliate the people involved, and so I don’t blog about it. My writings are an attempt, in many ways, to teach myself, to analyze the errors and see if I can distill it down to an essay that I might remember later.
So my blog, I think, is a library. Include it, raid it, call the functions in it that you need. The library is mostly bug-free, and I’ll let you know if I’ve applied a patch. Enough people have benefited from it over the years that I’m pretty sure it works on certain operating systems. I’m proud it exists, and if you ever have any questions on poly, I’ll try to answer them for you. Maybe I can head you off at the pass. And that’s the library.
But the me itself is a frail, human thing, prone to stumbling about in the dark like everyone else, and please don’t make the mistake of thinking this structure I’ve created to help guide you is me.
I am not the library. The library is the result of me. It’s a distinction I want you to recognize, because on any given day you could be a lot smarter than I am. And if I’m very lucky, maybe you’ll teach me a lesson.
I Wanted A Politician, Not A Puppet
One of the liberal complaints about Obama is, He didn’t do everything I wanted him to do. They had a laundry list of everything they wanted Obama to get done, including free socialist health care for everyone, and the fact that he didn’t do it means that he’s a bad politician.
Here’s my take: a politician who does everything you want is a bad politician.
See, politics is complicated. Really complicated. I couldn’t tell you who’s in charge of the Senate funding committees for the Pentagon, nor do I understand which Democrats have enough Republican constituents that they have to salve their conservative base periodically, nor do I have the slightest clues as to the rules of order for the House. I have a general idea of how things go, but it’s about as vague as describing the cellular mechanisms of my body fighting off a flu virus as “I sneeze a lot.”
I elect a politician to learn these things for me.
Electing a politician, any politician, is an act of faith. You vote for the guy who looks like he has enough of your concerns in mind, and then send him off to do your duties for you. And you trust that he’s smart enough to a) know the overall goal, and b) do what he’s able to do with what he has.
Look, do I think that Obama really tried hard to push English-style, socialized health care for everyone? No. No, I do not, and that is what I wanted. But did I also have a list of every member in both Houses, knowing what concessions I’d have to give to get them to vote for my desired health care bill, and a tally of the costs it would take? Did I have a list of the huge numbers of polls Obama doubtlessly took, determining what America as a whole thought on the topic? Did I know how much influence the insurance companies had in the House, or had I read any studies on the effects that a sudden shift to socialized medicine would have on America’s economy?
I did not. So I’m disgruntled, but I’m also willing to admit that Obama may have wanted just as badly as I did to have socialized health care for everyone, and was “only” able to push through a huge bill that completely changed the face of American health care. Politics is about realism, as in “What you can get done,” and I’ve read too many books on Lincoln to know that “what you want to do” and “what you can actually do now” are two very separate things.
If I had a politician who did everything I wanted, then I’d have a politician who had my expertise – which is to say, none. And he’d vote in all sorts of things, regardless of who it would piss off, regardless of whether it would actually pass, regardless of whether there were actually hidden consequences I hadn’t thought about that would make this disastrous if it did pass.
That’s not to say Obama gets a free pass, of course. It may well be that if I looked at all the secret data on Guantanamo Bay and the uptick in drone strikes, I’d be convinced to do what Obama is doing now. But I find that doubtful, and so if I had a choice on foreign policy, I might consider throwing my vote behind someone else. But, as the third Presidential debate pretty much proved, I don’t.
So no. I’m not entirely thrilled with Obama. But if I had a politician who did literally everything I asked of him, I’d probably have an inefficient puppet who made me feel good and accomplished zip. I’d rather have a politician who does what I want if I was informed enough to follow all the news to the extent that a politician does… which is to say a politician who’s going to frustrate and contradict me from time to time.