Notes from the road

[chipotle]

...and this time sent from the iPhone, using a native LiveJournal client.

I realized a few weeks ago that I had failed to update my address with the DMV, so my polling place was by tugrik's place. So, after making the trek down there and voting, I kept going and ended up in Morgan Hill. I'm getting lunch at a fabulous hole in the wall Mexican place, El Rincon, and seeing if I can minimize exposure to election results until 7pm local time. I am much more of a political junkie than I let on here these days, but fatigue has set in, and I expect way too much histrionics from all sides. I have had to stuff a sock in my mouth, virtually speaking, too often as it is. Every national election since 1964 has been about "cultural values" and about the idea that real Americans elect people who hate government, because who's better for a given position than someone philosophically opposed to that position's function? That's why the best CEOs are Marxists, clearly.

But I digress.

Lunch is finished now, and it's time to move on somewhere. Just driving around aimlessly will be a difficult temptation to resist, but I know I'll be home later.

Happy election day, no matter who you're voting for (or have voted for). Even that guy, or the other guy.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

"Wouldn't you rather our military be full of generals who hate war?"

Absolutely -- but I'd draw a distinction between, say, a director of public health who passionately hated disease, and a director of public health who was ideologically opposed to vaccination programs and WIC. The military parallel would seem thus to be "a general who passionately hated war versus a general who was ideologically opposed to the idea of having a standing army." I think one could make a good case for not having a standing army (I recall hearing a pretty intriguing case made that the Second Amendment and its concept of a militia was actually intended to be set in opposition to the concept of a standing army) -- but if one's going to actually have a standing army, I'd rather it be commanded by someone who believes that it's a worthwhile thing to have about.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of wanting to keep government as small as possible, but I think the tragic flaw in the way a lot of conservatives and libertarians look at it is to rank "keep government small" as a higher priority than "make government transparent and accountable." In practice, if things aren't transparent you can't easily tell whether you're making government smaller, and if there's little accountability, all you can do is occasionally bounce Brownie out on his ass because he didn't do a heckuva job after all. And if you actually succeed in making government small and efficient before it's transparent and accountable, you've just made things much, much worse. There is a persistent failure of the "government is a necessary evil" folks to face what would seem to me to be intuitively obvious: a state which you've stripped all powers but policing functions from is, by definition, a police state.