Another year older...

Oh hi it's my birthday...which is turning more into a meditative occasion for me as I get older rather than party + gifts day. Turns out it suits my personality better.

I have a weird thing on facebook and birthdays. If I wish other people a happy birthday, I try to find a way to not do it on facebook...mostly because I don't trust myself to be consistent enough to not somehow put my foot in my mouth with that kind of performed friendship. I'd forget someone important while simultaneously remembering someone less important. I hate the decision making process of deciding whether that person I haven't legitimately talked to for over five years still makes the cut. So you get the point, no facebook birthdays.

But then I feel guilty when other people wish me a happy birthday. So now my birthday isn't on facebook. Someone will out me eventually today, probably, but it may take a while. And did I mention the meditation? Because here's the thing. The person who outed me last year passed away later that same month. I remembered that - that she had been the one to out me - about an hour ago, and have been sitting here thinking about what it means to miss somebody and be sad that they're gone. It's this whole wrapped up bundle of change and sadness. If change is inevitable, does it make sense to be sad about it? And does being sad about something imply that you want to change it? I don't want to get too far into it right now, but this is something I've been thinking about off and on for a while. How do you find the right balance between accepting the world as it is and fatalism, or Panglossism...avoid the knee jerk reaction we have to "solve" or "explain" everything but still know when to take action when appropriate? It turns out be kind of a big question.

And I'm a year older, and people don't live forever and the world is not perfectible. But overall life is pretty good.

Charles Cooper's Barely Contained Fertility

One of my handicaps in life is that things that sound absurd to other people often make sense to me.

For example, Charles Cooper's argument that older heterosexual couples need to be allowed to get married to restrain the fearsome procreative power of men over the age of 55. I mean, I'm not denying that the image is funny, especially since I feel safe in assuming that Cooper is himself over the age of 55 and the justices he was making the argument to most definitely were. But, if you're ok with abstract philosophical arguments about human behavior, it's not unreasonable. Adult human beings have a strong tendency to have sex. An imperfect but widely attempted strategy for controlling that tendency is to let everyone have one "right" person to have sex with while making it "wrong" to do with anyone else. Paul said in Corinthians that it was better to marry than to burn, in the Good Earth Wang Lung gets his sons wives to keep them from going to prostitutes. (Although it occurs to me that Wang Lung was not a real person and his story was created by Pearl S. Buck, so I'm not actually branching out of western culture here). So sure, I guess if marriage exists for the sole purpose of preventing illegitimate children, the marriage of a 55 year old, presumably fertile, man to a 55 year old, presumably infertile, woman has a legitimate role in that.

But the problem is that the exact same logic applies to gay couples. Gay people are capable of procreative sex, after all. Assuming that no one ever has sex that contradicts their orientation is only slightly less naive than assuming people don't have sex unless they love each other and want to have babies together. Of course, this is the modern age and people have expectations about love and compatibility beyond gender that prevents making people get married from being a simple solution to any problem...but if conservatives are going to be going around claiming that making poor people get married is the solution to poverty, and making unwed mothers get married would eliminate gun crime, I don't see how they can deny that making gay people get married would prevent gay unplanned pregnancies.

Long time...

I've been thinking lately that it would really be nice to have time to update this more. Thinking isn't necessarily going to make it so...it turns out motherhood is kind of demanding, timewise, and the reasons I wish I could update more are precisely the reasons it will be difficult. It's easy to keep facebook open in the background and like people's pictures and such when you might have to drop everything and change a diaper at any moment. It's quite a bit harder to spend time focusing on what exactly you want to say, looking up sources and data, and really scrutinizing your argument before you hit publish. But I miss the people in my life who find the second a more meaningful form of interaction than the first.

Ironically, just as I've been thinking about this dilemma more and more, Google has decided to shut down Reader. Hopefully some other RSS feeder will step up, if we're really lucky it'll be one that allows following/sharing. But it's disconcerting, and a reminder of how much it sucked when following/sharing got shut off in the first place, and how passive I was about it. Not that I had any chance of changing the company's mind, but I didn't even vote with my feet. Of course, I'm not sure how much Google would have cared about me taking my non-paying business elsewhere.

Because I read Andrew Sullivan's blog, and because he's been very fixated on "the future of journalism" lately...going independent and setting up his own subscription based site. I have not chipped in my $20 yet...I mean to, I think it's reasonable, but I'm lazy and poor. And I need to subscribe to the Merced Sun Star now too, which I think is even more reasonable. I'm heavily dependent on them every election when I'm trying to figure out how to vote on local candidates, and I really think they're a great local paper. And it's only 99 cents a month so...not too steep for my civic duty. But $20 a year here and $12 a year there is quickly going to eat up what I'm reasonably going to spend on online journalism, and it seems to tip the scales towards getting more of your information from one source if possible, which isn't the healthiest thing. I'd like to see "the future of journalism" go to some form of micropayments filtered through RSS feeders, personally. With a sharing function.

And maybe free babysitting. Although actually, I'm in no way interested in reducing the number of hours I spend on childcare. I'd like to go to work less, but that would probably impact my ability to nobly expect to pay for the content I consume.

An excuse to bring up Grover Cleveland...

There's an interesting debate going on in the blogs I read about how the Republican party may need to change to attract more support next time around, particularly from non-whites. It's interesting, because there seem to be two basic schools of thought. The first is that the Republicans are a party with broadly appealing ideas that are basically held down by its association with the kind of people who are afraid of demographic change in this country. The second is that the core ideas of the Republican party aren't actually that broadly appealing at all, but until now it's been possible to prop them up through association with the kind of people who are afraid of demographic change. If the first is true, all they need to do is compromise on immigration and gay marriage, get their candidates to stop accidentally saying racist things, and they'll be good to go. If the second is true, they're a lot more screwed.

If you go back far enough, you can get to a time when the Republican party pro-business and anti-government spending, but not necessarily more (and generally less) pro-white supremacy than the Democratic party. And they were obviously successful at that point and won national elections. However, here's Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat elected president between the Civil War and 1913, talking about immigration in 1897:

A century's stupendous growth, largely due to the assimilation and thrift of millions of sturdy and patriotic adopted citizens, attests the success of this generous and free-handed policy which, while guarding the people's interests, exacts from our immigrants only physical and moral soundness and a willingness and ability to work.

Here's Woodrow Wilson on the subject in 1915:

Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation, would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane ardors of our politics. The right of political asylum has brought to this country many a man of noble character and elevated purpose who was marked as an outlaw in his own less fortunate land.

And here's Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the most prominent Republican senators of the time, talking about immigration in 1910:

There is a growing and constantly active demand for more restrictive legislation. This demand rests on two grounds, both equally important. One is the effect upon the quality of our citizenship caused by the rapid introduction of this vast and practically unrestricted immigration, and the other, the effect of this immigration upon rates of wages and the standard of living among our working people.

(all quotes found here)

Notice a difference? Presidents Harding and Coolidge both passed legislation restricting the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Hoover actually tried to suspend all immigration during the Great Depression. I honestly don't know how much nativism has always been a portion of the Republican appeal (although it might be telling that Catholics used to be as uniformly Democrat as blacks were Republican in the nineteen-teens and twenties), but it does kind of seem like it wasn't all austerity and fiscal discipline back then, either. It'd be mistake to assume that the Republican party is over and done with just because they only managed 48% of the popular vote this time around, but I think it's also a mistake to assume that a simple shift on immigration will actually be all that simple.

Aftermath of the Jungle Primary

So it's hard to say what the effects of the jungle primary system were...when (if) I have more time there's some numbers it could be interesting to look at, like whether the final winner was the same person who got the most votes in the primary, or if the second person won in any districts. On the most surface level though, it's probably worth noting that two of the incumbents who ended up running against someone from their own party in the general were defeated, which I think is a pretty high rate (although in a small sample size).

Specifics of those races below:

http://www.mercurynews.com/elections/ci_21944496

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/11/gloria-negrete-mcleod-bests-joe-baca-in-congressional-race.html

Oh and also...

"The Rape guy lost" "Which one?" Your party has serious issues if people have to ask "Which one?" #GOP #itstheTwentyFirstCentury— Alex (@AlexCarpenter) November 7, 2012

(borrowed from Andrew Sullivan, curator of the internet)

((and actually, they both lost))

Wow.

So, a lot of stuff happened last night.

Obama won, which was cool. Possibly improved on by the fact that Fox News and friends were so very sure that he wouldn't. It's 2012 and your viewers aren't the only people who matter anymore! As it was happening last night, it felt like the impetus was minority turnout...which if you're going to crush the hopes and dreams of a group of people who tried to give themselves an edge through voter suppression, is an awesome way to do it. I think I have to look at more numbers before I can say that's actually what happened though. And I'm sure Republicans will try to blame it on Sandy, or voter fraud, or who knows what else.

Oh, and can we say tipping point on gay marriage? If you live in a state whose name starts with an M, or something that looks like an upside down M, and isn't in the south or sort of kind of in the south like Missouri, or I guess Wyoming or Montana...alright I'll stop trying to make a trend out of this. Except the trend is, this is happening. It's only a matter of time.

Mostly though...CALIFORNIA! I mean sure, the all caps and the exclamation point are mostly only earned because my expectations were so very very low, but it almost kind of seems like some sort of logic actually infected the initiative process. Voters conceded that a teeny tiny increase in the state sales tax might possibly worth it to keep schools running (along with a bigger tax increase on high income earners, in keeping with the "tax anyone but me" philosophy). They even conceded that giving minor offenders, like pot heads, life sentences might not be the best use of our precious revenue. And supposedly somewhere in the state, the legislator that makes the difference between the Republicans having the 33% they need to block all tax increases, and not having that 33%, stands a real chance of losing. It might be too much to hope that this will mean the rediscovery of moderate Republicanism in this state, but I'll go ahead and hope anyways.