a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3999 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Two explosions at Boston marathon finish line.

You missed the point of my first post. Politicians do what they do because they want votes. They know that if they act a certain way in a time of crisis -- by ramping up security measures pointlessly after the fact, or by allowing BPD to shut down all cell service -- they will get votes next time they run. So they do it. Find the root source; don't stop at one of the links in the chain.





JTHipster  ·  3998 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Okay, so let's trace this back.

Problem start: Politicians perform ineffectual acts to improve the perception of security within the city, which have no real effects and increase alienation and hostility, which results in more crime. Why?

Because they get votes for it. They get votes because people feel like they need to see that the government is doing something, even if that thing is ineffective. People feel like they need to see that because people do not have the time in the modern world to thoroughly research every single issue, which would give them a wider perspective and thus a better understanding of the problems at hand, which would at the very least lead to the demand for a more effective solution.

People do not have the time to research every single issue because people are generally employed in busy, high stress environments and have various other responsibilities which remove leisure time beyond the weekends. People have this high stress environment because the philosophy of a modern corporation - which we'll just group in to one for this dumbed-down thought experiment here - is that the work day is not actually 9-5, its any time they can be called on a cell phone, thus removing the normal safety net of relaxation that comes from having a job with predictable hours.

Businesses think that they can do this because people have been trained for their entire lives to think that competing for a job is incredibly competitive and that if you are not working hard you are somehow immoral, and that hard work requires sacrifices in order to succeed. People think a lack of sacrifices and a lack of hard work is immoral because of the tradition of the Puritans in America to follow the teachings of Calvin as well as the more modern teachings of puritans in England, who believed that material wealth was a measure of the likelihood of a person to get in to heaven.

The Puritans in England believed that material wealth became a measure of a person's success because it was deemed to be God's reward for living a godly life. This belief truly stemmed not from religious disagreements but from the necessity of Puritan life in England; with no other place to work, no ability to really go in to politics or law, the Puritans were forced to become industrialists. They were forced to become Industrialists because the Anglican Church banned the Puritans from holding most public offices and from becoming ordained ministers, which traced back to the Oliver Cromwell and his role in the two English Civil Wars.

Oliver Cromwell only took part in the wars due to the conflict of interests between the authoritarian crown and the consitutionalist Parliament. This divide traces itself back to the Magna Carta, which only existed because of the belief that feudal lords in England had that the King was limited by the power of law as well as certain individual rights and protections against various malpractices in the government.

So the Magna Carta is basically the root of all problems because it created an environment where Puritans couldn't run for office, so they became industrialists and reconciled their religious beliefs with the necessities of industrialist living, which created an environment in which people believed that wealth was an indicator of morality, which persisted as a system of values still in place in the United States today, which in turn caused an environment where people make sacrifices to work harder because it is viewed as morally correct. These sacrifices included free time, which means less time for researching issues such as national security, which means people are unable to accurately assess if an action taken by a politician is actually effective, but they still require some fulfillment on an obvious problem, so they demand that some action be taken regardless of what it is.

Or it could be a political agenda, it could be the conflicting values of security versus freedom, it could be people's inherent belief in their right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness coming in contact with the desire to remain private individuals. Do you know how many roots there are to problems? You can't go back to the root of the problem and just tear it up or try and fix it because the root of the problem influences the world we live in so heavily we wouldn't exist without it.

You can't tackle roots, because problems aren't a weed. Problems are conflicts of values, and you have to resolve the conflict to actually overcome it. Now I don't know the answer to this problem, and I really can't be expected to know. I know what's ineffective, and I know what is a breach of trust, and I know what's done for politics and votes. I don't know how you give the public a solution that is also actually beneficial, but I can guess it involves researching the crime, and making changes, real changes, that will prevent the crime from happening in the future.

It could be better, cheaper housing, it could be getting more work for people, it could be mental health care and anonymous treatment, it could be more police officers in the area to reduce crime or even lighting the streets up more. Or it could be the problems of the city themselves; maybe there just aren't enough trees, someone gets super stressed because they don't see trees any more, it compiles everything wrong with their life, and they blow up. I don't know.

But a politician should. They're the ones with power, they're expected to have solutions that are effective. That's the whole point of this civilization thing, its why we trust people with power in the first place. Yes, at any point the President could probably just nuke North Korea and say fuck it, but we're putting trust that he'll try and do something better than that, something that provides a long-term solution rather than a short-term bandaid. Eventually people are going to realize that security measures like these, with all of the cameras and the service shut-downs and the searches, those don't actually solve anything. They're a bandaid patched on to a gaping wound. And then the politicians who took part in it, their votes will dry up.

I know its hard to see it these days, but people actually do like honest politicians, and people like it in the long-term when the hard decisions are made. Yes, there will be complaints. There will always be complaints, from everyone, about everything. That's not important. If you put an honest effort in to doing something good and effective, even if the change is small - hell, it might just be getting more lights and more trees in the city - then people will remember it. And votes will come.