My letter to the editor published today

@llangley found it. Sarasota

@llangley My cover is blown. They have published more than 50 of my letters to the editor since I starting writing them in 2013. They will only publish one every 30 days.

@Felton10 @llangley

My grandmother used to send so many letters to the editor (in the 1950s and 1960s) that local people informally called the opinion section of the local paper “____'s column”.

Only: the paper declined to publish every single (often daily) letter she sent. So she called to complain. They patiently explained that other people’s opinions deserved time and column space as well.

After that, she got a PO Box alt address, and started sending letters under pseudonyms. However, the pseudonym names always shared her initials. The paper knew she was the writer in these cases, but published some of the alt-name letters anyway, for grins.

She had a distinctive clear writing style, and was not sure that anyone on the planet (besides herself) truly understood the dangers of World Communism; so her work was pretty recognizable.

She also harassed US Congresspersons without mercy, on the same topic. Some of the persons who were on Speaker Jim Wright’s Congressional staff still remember dealing with her.

@f00l @Felton10 @llangley
So you’re saying your mom was a Karen before being a Karen was cool?

@Felton10 @llangley @mike808

Re: My Grandmother (not my Mom, who was never vocal about political issues)

No. My Grandmother was not, and never would have been, a Karen.

Because she was always polite, dignified, and respectful in political and philosophical discussion. This was a core value of hers, based on the behavioral values and manners of a different era.

And she believed passionately in rational education, and in Enlightenment values.

I never saw her be publicly rude to anyone. I never saw her engage in trolling. I never saw her assert some imaginary personal entitlement.

She was a well educated and literate insanely obsessed crank to a large degree.
She did make intellectual errors, of course, often v severe ones. Who doesn’t?

But she was someone who regularly read the Congressional Record and Foreign Policy etc. Her discussions stayed rational (according to the standards of that era), and stayed civilized.

I once heard from another person (eyewitness who was politically congruent with her):
who saw her go up to a group of people with whom she politically disagreed (these were fans of Johnson’s Great Society initiatives) at a Democrat party meeting, have an intelligent and polite discussion with some of them, and end by saying she had enjoyed the conversation, thanking them for showing up, and for speaking with her.

This was a person who wore white gloves and a hat when she went downtown, until the late 1960’s, at least.
She thought being stupidly irrational, or trolling, or intellectually cheap, or deliberately implying falsehoods etc, were the heights of personal vulgarity. And she was not vulgar.

If she were with us today, I suspect she would be horrified and furious about all that social-media and tagline-driven garbage that passes today for “political debate” across the liberal/centrist/conservative divide.

Civilized political discussions among people who disagreed widely were pretty commonplace then. And people mostly stayed friends.

It was a different time.
(Of course, that era had enormous ethical and moral deficits, as well as some strengths. It was far from being all good).

Incidentally, I’ve never worn that so if hat and I don’t ever remember wearing white gloves.
I trust I’m also not a Karen.

@f00l @Felton10 @llangley @mike808
Back when the paper meant something, we had some regulars on the letters page. The only one whose name I can remember was a lady named Hilma V. Skinner. She was a very rightwing and righteous character and was constantly fuming about the dirty hippies and commies and sexual deviates and so on. She seemed so out there at the time - now she’d probably sound almost like a moderate!

@Felton10 @llangley @mike808
@f00l Your grandmother sounds like a class act and a true lady. My mother’s best friend, who I called my aunt, was kind of like that.

@f00l @Kyeh @llangley @mike808 My uncle who was chemist by trade was a prolific letter writer. So much so that when he passed away a couple of months ago, the Washington Post had a article on his letter writing exploits. I may have gotten some of my interest in that from him.

@Felton10 @Kyeh @llangley @mike808

My “Always-Right Grandmother” (as we grandkids privately named her) was a true lady, and a class act.

And she was also sometimes a totally obsessed nutcase or crank. A well-educated and polite one, tho

Mostly, the latter stuff showed up in political discussions. The family knew to avoid those topics w her: not because the conversations became rude, disrespectful, cheap, degenerative, or filled with “alt facts”; but rather because if one went there once, then that was the only topic for the rest of the evening.

Very peasant person and good soul, but “self-confident to a fault” type personality.

We grandkids did troll her, for her and our own amusement, tho.

When we were at her house, we would sometimes go thru the stacks of printed Congressional Records (each day was the size of a fat phone book);
we would find a few stray unrelated topics (say, some mining regulation somewhere, and some economic facts somewhere else), and string them into an imaginary Communist Conspiracy. Then go running to her, all breathless, with an update on our fantasy version of an Ultimate Threat To American Peace, Freedom, and Democracy.

She knew exactly what we were doing; she would “de-communize” the topic w a few jokes, and then give us a quickie anti-Communist lecture, followed by an order to play outside, and a reminder to leave her papers where and as we found them.

@f00l @Felton10 @llangley @mike808
Hah - she got you doing research in the Congressional Records as kids, that’s pretty impressive! She sounds like a formidable woman.

@Felton10 link please!

@dyounghbic in my state the republicans passed a law that kids can’t go to school without all their basic childhood shots. No shots, no school. Then report them for not going to school if their parents haven’t filed to home school them. Hospitals require shots including the flu shot if you want to work there. How is this any different?

@dyounghbic
If the politicians are lying, why do you keep re-electing them?

@somf69
which we can now find…

@zachdecker

One person in the WH *could", conceivably, break the future of the nation thru an insanely terrible decision or series of decisions on military or security issues, or, perhaps, on economic issues.
The “movie version of our doom” is a hopefully rather far outlier possibility for the near future, to my mind. The nation has always shown a lot of resilience.

However: if enough things happen that entirely corrupt areas of political discourse:
election unfairness,
corruption of debate and media and the resulting hit to civil liberties,
or if enough of the voting public can’t discern facts from non-facts,
or can’t recognize the most basic decent-quality political and economic reasoning vs its opposite,
or if the nations falls too far into my side is right, so political unfairness, or even massive political unfairness, to your side is justified thinking, the nation is at risk.

All historical great powers (the better ones and the worse ones) had their eras of dominance, followed by a fall, a defeat, or a fast-or-slow diminishment of prestige, wealth, power; and possibly also a diminishment of whatever morally admirable qualities a few of those great powers might have once possessed.

The US is not proven immune to this possibility.

For example (confining to external issues in this instance):

We’ve been idiots on China since the early 1990’s, and every single President, including the most recent two ex-Presidents, has completely blown this threat (“designed-for-media” anti-China rhetoric that China doesn’t care about, and economic anti-China moves that China privately laughs at, do not, and will not, ever count as intelligent or useful policy re China).

Who wants China to be the wealthiest, most scientifically and militarily advanced, most powerful nation on the planet?
Hands up, pls Any takers?

As things go, they will be, and rather soon. We don’t appear to even begin have a serious plan to deal with this.
Dealing with the China threat is more complex than it might look. And China internal political, economic, and security planning is for the long term.

For starters, the way higher education is financed in the US most change (at least as regards any scientific, technical, medical, economic, health, rhetoric, research, or logic-related majors).
If China has 100 or more quality technologists, scientists, health researchers, IT specialists, economists, industrial experts, and engineers for every one of ours, guess who is likely to dominate? Hmmm.

We’re also blown it re security policy, esp as regards Russia and hackers threats. Esp state-sponsored threats.

Just to mention two areas of clear external vulnerability.

There no evidence that this century will be another “American century”.

And if China dominates the world, or if China plus some combo of dictatorships-in-fact are as powerful and wealthy as we are:
Then what is the long future for countries that try to abide according to Enlightenment values?

(Values such as fairly reliable public information, basic public understanding of what facts are and what “reliable fact sourcing” is, civilized and respectful debate, individual rights, elections that aren’t “show elections” and that aren’t targeted by legal/rhetorical/policy garbage attacking legitimate procedures and results… Etc)

Our doom is far too early to call. And our future is far from secure.
And right now, this moment, we (not China, not fascist counties round the world, not anyone else) are our own worst enemy.

And we’re not in a position to afford this weakness.

I hope we figure how to fix that last before someone (internal or external) exploits it more seriously.

@zachdecker Once the election will of the people is subverted by a person or any groups of people, it is a slippery slope from then on. We came awfully close to that happening in the 2020 election by people who only sought to retain power regardless of what the people wanted. Scary stuff.

@Felton10 @zachdecker

Indeed, scary stuff.

One disturbing thing I did not foresee:

I thought, or hoped, that, once the legitimate and valid election results were upheld, and a new, saner admin was in place (it being not possible that the new admin would be less sane than the 45 one), the political climate would improve.

I had hoped for more intelligence, intellectual honor, sanity, civility; for more political discourse that was worthy of respect, rather than being merely simple-minded, or trolling and false, or potentially a sign of intellectual or emotional deficiency in the person speaking or posting.

To my mind, this trend toward visibly adult-level conduct and thinking on political topics has not yet started to be more the norm.

@f00l @zachdecker Just like those who thought Trump would be rational and sane after he was elected, they were wrong about this also. Everyone underestimated his inability to never admit he was defeated. When he found his followers would buy into this lie and he could continue his control over the Republican party by continuing it, the handwriting was on the wall.

@f00l @Felton10 @zachdecker
Wow, thoughtful, in-depth, serious political discussion in this forum? I feel like I’m actually in the Casemates pol thread or something. I have to say I’m impressed and I hope it continues.

@f00l @Felton10 @Kyeh @zachdecker
Hmm. Maybe start a new topic:

Monty Python’s Jabberpoliticocky.
/me ducks

@Felton10 @Kyeh @mike808 @zachdecker

Might need a hide of

/giphy Monty Tungsthon

@zhicks1987 We are a representative democracy.

@ircon96 @zhicks1987
We are a bicameral representative democracy. The house is representative of population, the senate is representative of land ownership.

@mike808 @zhicks1987 And that, kids, is our Snapple cap civics lesson of the day, free of charge & well worth the price of admission!