The wellspring flowth ever still

Re: deleted text.

Well, yeah, I meant what I said, sort of. Of course it wasn't specifically targeted at you Paul, but to all of us. Or mainly to myself. For the others' sake, in essence I said: arguing about politics on DiDTT is sort of useless, as we're old enough now and smart enough to exert force and cause change in the world if we try hard enough. And regardless of what you do, please post on DiD, because I'm liking where things are going and I think this is shaping up to be a cool campaign.

But I deleted it because it occurred to me after posting, that some of my ideas about things become more solidified by DiDTT sparring. Paul and Chris may not have changed my mind, but these discussions certainly caused me to think more about these sorts of issues. It seemed to me that this was an awful waste of brainpower, us yelling at each other, when it's our congress we should be yelling at if we want to effect change. (Pretty sure that's 'effect' there, not 'affect'.)

I've long said that the reason I work on- er, what I work on, is because I'm not smart enough to solve real problems like poverty or racism. But that doesn't excuse intellectual laziness when it's time to vote. Up until very recently I used to shrug at economics, local politics, all that stuff... thought it was 'of the temporal world' and not worth my time. I'm starting to think otherwise. Starting to realize that not caring about the outer world, not voting, not voicing opinions when my fiance's family's dinner guest says that the middle east should be bombed into glass- that all this is laziness that makes the world worse by my inaction.

So if you'll excuse the expression, I thought initially that what all this TT amounted to was intellectual masturbation- solipsistic pointless fun but not proactive or pro-creative. (Bringing out the big metaphors here.) After making that decision, I recanted, as I'm now somewhat more informed. Hell, I know who Milton Friedman was, sort of. Didn't know that last week.

There are problems with our system. I'm unconvinced that a flat tax or flat welfare is the solution. I'm not totally opposed, mainly because they require less bureaucracy, and I think bureaucracy is the world's great evil; Hannah Arendt was right.

But honestly I don't know what to do. Radically changing the system might improve things- but things like this (i.e., anything involving government or corporation) tend towards glut and corruption in any form, so anything you do might be only a short-term fix. Might make things worse though, of course.

Hard hard problems. In the end, I guess that's why I'm a capitalist. If you're poor, it's easier to work to make yourself rich than to make everyone rich. Far fewer variables, it's just an easier problem to solve.

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Just to clean up, ya I know that Apollo and Manhattan were government projects. My point, poorly made, was: where are our Apollos today? The big government plan is, apparently, reorganization of the middle east. The genome project was partially government, but a private company did it faster and cheaper. Look at space travel: it's had to become private. It's really not feasible to vote for both space exploration and more welfare.

I'd love to have government funding to do my work, but somehow it's never worked out. Gotten lots of private money, and I think that's the way of the future. It's certainly the way of the past. The NIH didn't really even exist- at least not as the major biomed funding source- until after WWI. Before that, science was all private. May be returning to that, unless the general cycle of domestic-foreign-d-f-... continues (withdrawal from Iraq and the glut of veterans might boost up the NIH again).

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Er, I'm done for now. Oddly, it's more fun to hide behind an NPC and post something like Ezekiel's thing below. Apprentice Steve and potionguild.blogspot.com, RIP.