Political: Refugees and Witches

For context, I'm writing this on the evening of November 5th 2020, two days after Election Day, and with that election leaning towards Biden but still officially undecided.

I've been caught off guard over the last couple of days by the amount of fear I've encountered from Trump voters. I live in Mississippi, and most of my friends and relatives live in Tennessee or Louisiana, so most of the people I know voted for Trump. Tuesday I was heartened by the smashing of one assumption. Mississippi of course voted overwhelmingly for Trump but also voted overwhelmingly to adopt a new state flag and get rid of the one with the Stars and Bars on it. We also voted overwhelmingly to remove the Confederate monuments from public display and move them to more suitable locations like museums. I was proud of my state for passing those measures because we've had no major protests here, nor any massive campaigns designed to shame people into taking either of those measures. For most of us, we voted to do those things as soon as the opportunity was presented. So much for the assumption that Trump supporters are a bunch of racists who just want to see non-white people held down; there's genuine concern among MOST Trump voters for the well-being of their communities and the comfort of their neighbors. There are racists who support Trump, of course, and I know a couple, but for the vast majority racism has nothing to do with it.

In fact, I've found that most of the people I know support Trump out of fear of the Radical Left. This wasn't surprising to me, but what did surprise me - and may surprise you, too - is just how much power they genuinely believe the Radical Left has, and especially what they'll suddenly be able to do with Biden in office, assuming he wins. I thought what I assumed most intelligent people thought, that Biden is a centrist "Clintoncrat" favoring more intervention overseas, more global trade agreements, stepping up government power, and all those other things I don't really approve of. But it turns out that it's not just a political talking point when these people think Biden is some agent of a socialist agenda who's going to ruin our country and hand control over to the EU or something like that. And the way I know that this is what people genuinely believe, is that I've spent the past couple of days now reassuring people who are genuinely afraid this is what's about to happen. Most of these people aren't conspiracy theorists. I do know two people who see this ongoing vote count as some sort of tactic to steal the election from Trump, but those two aside, everyone else is accepting a Biden victory as an honest victory, and scared to death about the implications.

I'm having to reevaluate my moral position in light of this, because, like most non-Trump-supporters, I've assumed that their continuing support of bad idea after bad idea was a political thing, that they kept repeating the talking points because they just loved their guy so much they didn't want to admit he'd made any mistakes. If they really believed what they were saying however...

They really did support building the wall because they really thought people crossing the border were coming here to commit crimes and then take their ill-gotten booty back over the border.

They really did support the Muslim Ban because they really think all Muslims are terrorists looking to kill us.

They really do think Bernie and AOC are really on the verge of outlawing airplanes and hamburgers.

They really do think a tariff is a good idea because they really think China's engaged in predatory trade practices that are sucking the money out of our country (or whatever wasn't stolen by illegal immigrants, presumably).

They really do support the missile strikes on North Korea, Syria, and the drone attack on Iran because they really do believe the people taken out both bear some responsibility for 9/11 and were in the process of planning the next one.

If you look at all the bad policies Trump's had a hand in, and look at the possibility that his supporters honestly bought into the justifications for them, it's a weird feeling. I feel like I've arrived in Salem right after the witch trials were over only to find that the survivors are still genuinely afraid there are more witches out there. I don't know how to explain to them that a) there aren't and b) there never were any witches in the first place. We all thought the panic over the refugees was thinly disguised racism, because who would ever think poor people fleeing a war-torn country might secretly be hiding dangerous criminals and terrorists in their midst? Now I know people really thought that was the case. So what do I do? You can just dismiss them as idiots the same way we dismissed them as racists, but I don't think that's helpful. Idiots still vote, for one thing, but if people object to something because they're wrong and not because they're terrible people, doesn't that mean there's still hope for them? I think it says that there's a lot of truth to the idea that we're living in different versions of reality.

People are listening when I reassure them that Biden has more in common with Reagan than he does with Bernie, and that if he is secretly being controlled by a Democrat cabal, it's made up of people like Hillary Clinton, not people like Elizabeth Warren. That tells me that we have a short window where people are open to the idea that their view of reality might be wrong. Suddenly their version is a lot scarier than the version I live in, which is prime opportunity for convincing people. They suddenly don't like what they believe. But the other part of the approach - which I've been stressing a lot recently - is presenting them with the facts in a way that doesn't appear threatening. Reality needs to be seen as a welcome escape from Trump World, not another harrowing alternative they also don't want to live in.

Personal & Philosophical: Morality of Death 2: Politics In The Time of a Pandemic

Since I only post something here when I have something I want to get off my chest and use as a reference for later, I haven't needed to post anything for a while because there haven't been any new topics in the public discourse in a while, so I haven't had any new opinions in a while. No apologies for that. But now of course we have something that affects everyone, and I have strong opinions about it, just like everyone, but of course my opinions don't line up with anyone else's, just like always. So here are my opinions on the pandemic and why I have them even though nobody else agrees with me.

This is related to my previous post I called Morality of Death, where I raised a lot of questions but didn't give any answers, because there really aren't any answers to them. I gave my own views a little but I didn't explain a whole lot about them, so let's start with a recap of that:

1) Death is inevitable. Lives are never "saved", only extended.
2) Quality of life is more important to me than life itself. This may take a little more explanation, because most people are going to disagree with this statement. My values are influenced by things I've already written about elsewhere, but the short version is that I don't actually have anything left to live for. That statement sounds more bleak than I mean it to. I'm now 35 years old and I've already had a full life packed with all sorts of transformative experiences. I've already done most of the things that people want to do with their lives. See my post called Lowering the Bar for a list of them. But as that goes, I'm married, gainfully employed, and have already checked off everything on my bucket list except for two or three that realistically are never going to be checked off (I'm already too old to canoe down the entire Mississippi, I'm never going to be able to afford to build a 500-foot single-room tower to live in, and nobody else in my community has any interest in creating a community support network). And my wife and I don't have kids, and we aren't going to. That's a big one. So this effectively means that at this point I am just marking time and waiting for the end, because I have nothing left I want to do. I can't kill myself because of my religious beliefs and the pain I don't want to cause my wife and loved ones, so here I stay, living a completely meaningless life and just waiting. For this reason, I value the quality of the waiting room a lot more than people who still have things they want to accomplish with their lives or who have kids filling them with motivation to stick around and keep achieving things. I pass the time with lots of hobbies that keep my brain occupied, but that's about it.
3) For me, a life of insufficient quality isn't worth living. I'd be better off dying and freeing up the resources I'm taking up for the use of others.

This brings me to the reason for this particular post.
Because I'm definitely going to be dead 100 years from now; and I value keeping the time between now and the time of my death fun and comfortable (in ways that don't violate my morals) more than I value putting that time off for as long as possible; I don't really care whether I survive this pandemic or not. For that matter, I don't really care whether my family members survive it or not. Sure, if they die, I'll be very sad, but refer back to point 1. At some point, they're going to die anyway, and if I'm still alive when they do, I'm going to be very sad. So we might as well die now as any other time because it's not going to be any less sad, any less painful, or any less inevitable for people I love to die 20 years from now than it is if they died today.

Because I have those values, I'm more than willing to pursue the herd immunity approach until a vaccine becomes available. Historically that's the best solution for the long term. We're not still dealing with the Plague of Justinian in 2020 because eventually it killed everybody it was going to kill, and everyone alive today is immune to it. This is a better approach than the classic example of an eradicated disease, smallpox. Smallpox could still come back and become a pandemic again because we eradicated it through vaccines, not through herd immunity. It's a dangerous biological agent, even a potential weapon because of that. Justinian's Plague is done. People don't want to go the herd immunity route if there's a way around it because it has such a high up-front "cost." Just letting nature take its course and letting the virus run around until it can't kill anyone anymore is going to result in an awful lot of deaths. But again, I disagree with pretty much everyone that those deaths are actually preventable. They're not. All we can do is postpone them. And for people who actually have something to live for, they might want to postpone it as long as possible, but that doesn't invalidate my views based on my values.

Would I take a vaccine if it became available? Sure, because I don't want to infect people who don't want to die. But until one does, I still say let it do its thing. The more people get infected now, the fewer people have to worry about weaponized Coronavirus after it's eventually eradicated. And if those people die of it, those people were always going to die anyway. We all are. And I'd rather leave an immune world behind when we do.

Personal/Political - Season 45 of US Government

This is my first post in over a year. I haven't had anything this long to blog about since then.


I had a major breakthrough today with a friend of mine when it comes to discussing politics. For the record, my friend is a liberal, black, gay Christian. I'm a white, straight Christian and my political position remains rather unquantifiable. I keep saying independent but that's beginning to take on some connotations of its own. I like Dan Carlin's label “Martian” quite a bit. I'm just going to refer to my friend as Dan here. Maybe I can give the impression that I know Dan Carlin better than I do.


My friend and I have been arguing about politics, including racial politics, for a long time. It doesn't usually go anywhere, but today we had some real understanding get through, and it's because we finally found a good allegory we could both relate to. That was so valuable, I thought I would summarize the discussion here. Maybe you can also make use of it.


Dan's pretty heavily invested in identity politics. Most of our disagreements over the years have had to do with us having differing opinions which Dan has been quick to dismiss. “You just think that way because you're white/straight/etc” was his go-to excuse for not having to listen to whatever my opinion is. Whenever I've had an opinion that he disagreed with, it got thrown out under that excuse, and whenever I've had an opinion that he agreed with, it usually got a patronizing “I'm surprised a {label} like you can see that.” That all may have changed today, because I think I finally got across that it isn't the labels I'm arguing about.


Now, what Dan finally got across to me today is that he sees criticism of Obama, our original topic of discussion, as a criticism of all of Obama's labels, not of him personally. This is an issue because of course Dan shares several labels with Obama, so every time I've pointed out a flaw in Obama, Dan sees it as pointing out a flaw in Dan. I'm going to do a better job in the future of emphasizing the difference between comments on a person and comments on other people who share that person's labels.


The defense of Obama began by comparing the government to a movie and elections to casting. (By the way, when I say “actor” here I mean it in its now mostly gender-neutral sense. These terms could apply equally to men or women.)


Dan says, and I'm paraphrasing, imagine that there are a number of actors up for the lead role. The lead role is a white male in the source material that's being adapted here, and in previous productions a white male has always been cast in the lead. This time, though, the casting director finds a black actor who's better at the part than any of the white actors who are up for it. So the black actor gets cast, and everyone slams his performance because the part went to a black actor, even though his acting was at least as competent as all the white actors who've played the part before. I didn't say this at the time, because it was kind of understood between us, but Dan's exactly right that this is where a lot of Obama's criticism comes from. But it isn't – and never has been – my problem with him.


I want to modify the metaphor a little bit. Instead of talking about one movie, let's say it's a very long-running TV show, now in its 45^th season. All the actors have some creative control – in fact way back in the beginning most of the lead roles were filled by the writers and even the show's creators. Nowadays the writing and acting are largely separate, but it still works. The writers make a big deal about listening to the viewers and casting of the leads is still pretty much by viewer approval, even if the other actors and the writers limit the pool of actors to cast a lot more than they used to. We get a new lead actor every season and the other actors and writers come and go with some regularity. The show ran pretty smoothly for a while, and we all watched the show and liked it. Even though the characters may have had some pretty reprehensible views and done some horrible things, especially in the early seasons, they largely represented the values and morals of the viewers, and a lot of the stuff we didn't like early on has evolved out of the show.


Then in the 28^th season the lead actor (Woodrow Wilson in real life) had an unusual amount of creative control and changed the main character a little bit. Every lead actor since has maintained and increased that level of control, and changed the character more and more. He takes up more and more of the show every season now. The writers have to listen to the main actor a lot more than they used to, and they don't listen to the viewers at much. The other characters don't get as much screen time as they used to, and they're more and more relegated to supporting and background characters now in a show that's increasingly just the story of the lead character, and by extension the actor playing that character. These other actors - and the writers - don't care, either, since they still get paid the same as they always did and don't have to work as hard as they used to.

While viewers have been getting more and more dissatisfied with the show over time, none of that dissatisfaction has much effect on production. People who are “hate-watching” the show look the same in the ratings as everyone else. The show keeps going further and further down the track that 28^th actor moved it onto. New leads are cast now by promising to change the character and make the show work more like the way it used to, minus all the horrible stuff of course.

Everything came to a head with the 44^th season when the first black actor was cast in the lead role. He was cast more than anyone else before on the promise of reforming the show so that most of the viewers would enjoy it, instead of just a few. Once cast, just as Dan said, he did the job just the same way all the recent lead actors have done it. Except for the fact that he looks a little different, he's the same sort of actor playing the part the same way. And people did, and still do, complain that he did a bad job of it because he's black, or because of a dozen other reasons, ignoring the fact that he was pretty much the same as everyone that came before him. Now, in the 45^th season, we have another lead actor. This one came in from being an advertising executive, too. He knows the business inside and out but he has no previous acting experience, so when he also promised he was going to reform the show, and had the professional resume to back up the idea that he could, he got cast. Lo and behold, he's now running the show just the same way the actors before him did.

So when I criticize the job Obama did, I'm not complaining that he was the wrong guy for the part because he's black. When I criticize Trump, it's not because he's not black. I don't think anything in Obama's background up to that point precluded the idea that he could have been a good president. The problem is that I don't like the character anymore (What, so now you hate Dr Who? Joked Dan). I haven't liked what the character was turning into for 17 seasons now. If I have any particular animosity towards Obama, it's because I voted for him, and I voted for him specifically because of his promise to correct the overreaches of the previous administrations, and then he doubled down on them!

So what am I going to do? Dan suggested change the channel or start my own.
I can't change the channel – move to another country – for four reasons. Most of the other channels are broadcast in a language I don't speak. Those channels, and even the other ones in English, don't have shows that particularly reflect my values any more than my own show does. And they certainly don't want viewers from my show drifting into their audience and then trying to change THEIR characters. Finally, although this is more personal than philosophical, I'm married now and my wife doesn't want to.
I can't start up my own channel for a whole host of reasons. Once upon a time that was doable, but now all the channels are full – I'd have to take over part of someone else's show and steal their resources, advertisers, and viewers. I can't justify that just to see my show get made, even if I had the resources to do it.
I can't just not watch, because then I won't be able to relate to the rest of society. And when stuff from the show happens that affects my life, I won't know how to respond. I won't even be able to justify complaining to the writers how they don't listen to me anymore. And just continuing to hate-watch the show just ensures that we keep getting more of the same. So what's left?


Turn off the TV? Oh right. Outside the metaphor, that's suicide.

Personal/Political: If I Were President

With the most controversial election in my lifetime looming in front of me, I've had a lot of thoughts about what I think is wrong with with our political system and what I think ought to be changed. As part of my ongoing series trying to “present” my politics, here are some of the things I would do if I had control of the executive branch.

Some of my priorities: Don't overstep the bounds of executive authority; Solve the long-standing problem with legislative corruption; Reconcile the problem between the government doing what the money wants instead of what the people want; Prune wasteful, corrupt, and/or redundant agencies to both reduce the size of the federal government while improving its efficiency; and attempt to move more power into the hands of individual voters.

I can't say whether I'd run as a Democrat or a Republican. It would probably be determined by which party was at least publicly espousing the sort of things I want to do in office at the time.

Step 1: My Cabinet and the Department of Information

The first thing I'd do is dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and move all of its various agencies back where they were before Bush created the department. I think the whole formation of the department was a knee-jerk response after September 11 and we've since been exposed to 15 years of it screwing up our country. One of my major priorities during the election would be identifying competent cabinet officials based on what I know about them. I would do my best to pick people based on ability rather than politics. For example, Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana, would be my Secretary of State. He did what amounts to the Secretary of State's job throughout his time as governor, and he'd be excellent at it. Once I had a competent group, I'd leave most of the departments, especially the ones I'm not going to try to shake up, in the hands of people I could trust to keep everything going without my input and without distracting me.

With the DHS gone, I would form a long-overdue Department of Information. I'd do away with the CIA, the NSA, and any other little niche intelligence groups to be replaced with two: the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence and the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence. I think it's important to scrap the whole agency and start fresh so we could get rid of some of the baggage those agencies bring to the federal reputation. I would leave others, like the FBI, where they are, but I'd strip them of any sort of intelligence work not related to their primary purpose. The FBI, as a law enforcement agency under the DOJ, would keep doing things like watching suspected criminals (with the appropriate warrants), but would no longer be doing bulk surveillance to try to find people to suspect. I'd pick one agency, quite possibly the FBI, to take over all federal “security” jobs, instead of having 3 or 4 who have time and resources wasted with jurisdiction questions. This would also centralize all of their records, so there would be no more problems caused by one agency knowing something another one didn't. With all this concentrating of authority in the hands of one agency, I'd have to put a watchdog on them to provide oversight to keep them from abusing power. This is part of where the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence comes in: The Bureau of Foreign Intelligence would take over the CIA's job, with a clean record, and handle all the foreign intelligence work, as the name says.

The Bureau of Domestic Intelligence would have two main functions: gathering information from the people for the federal government, and watching the federal government for the people. It would need total authority to investigate other federal agencies.

I'd also restrict the ability of any one agency to classify information and make it secret: any other organization would have to submit it to the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence, who would be charged with weighing whether or not it's in the interest of the American people and/or national security, and then decide whether or not any given information could be declared secret. Just to make sure the new Bureau keeps its own record transparent and can't just classify all its own mistakes while exposing everyone else's, it wouldn't be able to classify any of its own information without approval from the FBI or another equivalent agency, so they'd in effect be covering each other at all times.

Step 2: Bureau of Domestic Intelligence and Survey Polls

Apart from watching the rest of the government, the main job of the Bureau of Domestic Intelligence (Have I used that term enough to just abbreviate it BDI from now on?) would be to gather information from the people for the government. This doesn't mean domestic spying – I'd largely get rid of any and all domestic spying programs – but polling: surveying instead of surveillance. Our polling system is incredibly underused, and technology has reached a point where it's time for an overhaul. Polling ought to be a full-time job, under the new BDI, where citizens can go into polls once per ballot to voice their opinions. The idea that people can influence how Congress votes by writing to their representatives and senators has not been shown to work except in some very extreme and public instances. When the US was considering attacking Syria, for example, the people were able to get them to back off, at least temporarily. Then we started hearing more and more about ISIS, until when the president said we have to go get them, the people were so afraid of them they just stayed out of it. ISIS of course is involved in Syria, so ipso-facto we got into a war in Syria right after the people said not to because the government found another way to do it. Now all we have to do is allow, or even help, ISIS gain control of one of the parts of the country we wanted to take from the Syrian government, and then we can take it from ISIS.

 

This kind of blatant disregard for the opinions of the voters should be stopped. I'll get to the blatant disregard for the people in the other countries in a while. I would transform spying on Americans into listening to them. I'm not talking about transforming us into a pure democracy, though. The constitution does guarantee us a republic, so it would be unconstitutional to put all power directly in the hands of the people. However, I've thought for years that a lot of the underlying problem with our government is that there is no instrument for measuring the Will of the People that they're supposed to be implementing. Suppose reform-minded leaders get into office, which they do sometimes. Once they get there, what are they supposed to change? What sort of laws do the people want? If they don't know that, how can they find out? Go through mountains of mail from their constituents, which only comes from people who still think writing paper letters is a good way of communicating and doesn't represent any sort of “common” view. Or maybe they can go to the streets and talk directly to the people, although I haven't seen that this works either. It always looks like a stunt, even if it's meant to be sincere. As a result, the people they talk to tell the politician what they want to hear, and the politician tells the people what they want to hear, and then everyone goes back to business as usual.

The biggest problems with both of these methods are firstly, there's no way to get a good representative sample of what people really want, and secondly, they're probably going to hear different things. In the end, they just do what everyone else does and listen to their paid advisers, who are of course paid to advise them in a certain direction.

The only way to really get them the information they need to do their jobs is the way we elect them to the job in the first place: we have to tell them at the polls. And we can't keep doing it only when we elect them, because that's why they spend so much money trying to convince us that they're doing a good job already. We need to tell them constantly. I'm talking weekly official polls, at official polling places, staffed by full-time professionals, where the people vote in numbers on laws, policies, etc. in order to ensure that the government has a good idea of what the will of the people is. The results of these polls remain advisory, though. Congress is still the deciding body, but suddenly we'd have something to go with their already-public voting records: people could see on a continual basis whether or not their politicians were actually voting in accordance with the way their constituents wanted them to. As president, I could use the “bully pulpit” to expose lawmakers who are ignoring their voters in favor of professional lobbyists.

Step 3: Satisfying the Money

If you've read this far, you're probably thinking “You'd never be able to pull this off. In fact, if you were running on a platform of doing something like this, you'd never get elected, because you'd be going against what the campaign contributors want by taking the power out of their hands.” And so far, you'd be correct. I hear a lot of reform advocates saying that we have to get the money “out of politics.” This might sound like a good slogan, but it's not reasonable. You're never going to get the money out of politics. This was true in Athens, it was true in Rome, and it's true now. We could pass all the laws we want to try to stop rich people and businesses from influencing government, but it just can't be done. Money finds a way; that is its purpose.

When you really look at it, it's not even right to get the money out of politics. Not only has the Supreme Court ruled that repeatedly anyway, but it's probably objectively right that the people who have more money have a bigger stake in the system than those who don't, and if they have more skin in the game, isn't it right that they should have more say in the outcome? The way I see it, the problem isn't that this influence exists. The problem is that what's good for business doesn't always line up with what the American people want. The “solution” they've been implementing is for the government to do what's good for business and either try to sell it to the people beforehand as being good for them, or just do it and then try to convince the people afterward that it's good for them.

I think a better solution all the way around would be to find out what the American people want, find out what would be good for business, then go with what the people want and pay the businesses off to let that happen. See my post about buying our way out of the oil industry for some more details on how we could do that.

Once we resolve the conflict between the Will of the People and the commercial interests, a lot of the corruption would go away. Of course, we'd still have the lobbyists trying to persuade the politicians just like we do now. How do we get that to stop corrupting the legislature? We get it above board. We get some laws in place that allow businesses to give to politicians directly. “But that's quid-pro-quo corruption!” you might say. Yes, and no. The whole reason we don't allow quid-pro-quo exchanges is because having politicians sell their votes means they vote the way the people who are buying them want. What we've done instead is have businesses donate money into campaign funds – some of the most regulated money on the planet – so that politicians have to do everything they can to get reelected because they've already pledged to vote the way their donors want, and the only way they can get the rewards is to stay in office and keep voting for them. How is that less corrupt than a system where the business gives the politician money and the politician votes the way the business wants them to? So really, we already have a quid-pro-quo system, but it's through just enough loopholes to stay legal while giving us none of the benefits. We just need a different system, then.

How about this? What if businesses could give money to the politician in an escrow account in exchange for their vote, but the politician couldn't collect the money until they leave office? This already exists, by a way, for the president. It wouldn't be a stretch to extend it to the House and the Senate. So now instead of a bough-and-paid-for politician who votes the way their donors want and ignores the people, we have mostly honest politicians who occasionally need to vote the way the people with the most stake in the government want. If they want to collect that money, they have to leave (and there goes any need for term limits) and if they want to stay in office, they need to vote the way their constituents want them to most of the time, with the BDI watching. You couldn't have anyone stay in office unless they made their voters and their donors happy, their votes would be public, their incentives would be public, and sure they'd sell a vote now and then but they'd mostly be beholden to their voters. That's several degrees of improvement with everyone getting what they want.

Step 4: Fix the Foreign Policy

I'm just going to say it: we have to stop antagonizing Russia. Let me go through some of the things we've done since the end of the Cold War. First, we promised we wouldn't take advantage of their weakness and wouldn't move NATO's borders an inch closer. Then we took advantage of their weakness with lopsided trade deals one after the other and expanded NATO to even include former Soviet satellite states right on their borders. Russia put their foot down when we started making overtures to Ukraine, a nation so culturally Russian in part that Russia once had more to do with Kiev than it did with Moscow and St Petersburg. So instead of pushing NATO in we sent in some NGOs to topple the elected government and try to install a pro-Western government that would ask for NATO on its own. Then when Russia took over a tiny bit of Ukraine for themselves and flew two bombers into the Gulf of Mexico, we acted like we were the aggrieved party.

In military terms, we need to pull the heck out of the entire Eastern Hemisphere. No NGOs, no troops stationed in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or any of that. Russia, and China, are going to rise to superpower status again whether we like it or not, and we're not doing ourselves any favors by either ignoring that fact or trying to hold them down. When they do make it, do we want them to remember us as the nation that did everything we could to hold them back? My plan would strengthen the position of the US in the world and increase military spending above its already stratospheric levels (and keeping the money happy), while at the same time pulling the pressure off the rising powers, and welcoming them, even helping them, reclaim their national pride and glory in a way that helps us do the same.

In a nutshell, I would focus on the navy. The US Navy is the backbone of the US military historically speaking, and in fact the navy is biggest determining factor in every military throughout history. Ours is the strongest in that history. It controls the skies, the seas, and the land with the Marines. In fact, the Navy does nearly all our military work for us, and is only supplemented by the Army and the Air Force when needed. I would use that force to form a sword and a shield for our country that no nation could possibly match. I'd establish fleet lines in both the Atlantic and the Pacific stretching from pole to pole. We'd allow no foreign military inside that lines, except Canada, Mexico, and any country in the rest of “our” hemisphere that gets its stuff together well enough to get some ships of their own. In other words, our military would have an impassable barrier holding half the world for us, but beyond that we wouldn't project power. Instead, I would invite Russia, China, and the rest to create their own naval lines alongside ours, so that they would feel included and encouraged in this idea instead of threatened by it. In the Atlantic and the Pacific there would be two great fleets sailing up and down past each other constantly, not like sentries menacing each other but as a fence between neighbors. If the UK wants to keep up their special relationship with us, then there can be a third, shorter dual line in the English Channel and the North Sea for the same purpose.

The true cooperative measures would come from the expansion of merchant shipping – after all, we let merchant ships from rival countries, even enemy countries, past our military ships now, so there's no reason to assume our floating fence would block those. There would be more of those than we have now with the oceans as safe as they would be with our respective navies constantly deployed in them. For that matter, we could expand our shipyards here in the US enormously just to build ships to sell to other countries for shipping. Think what that would do to the economy along with all the increased exports.

The other thing that would truly defuse the tension we have now is liberty calls for the navies. The one reason we'd let a Russian or Chinese fleet inside our barrier – escorted by a superior number of our own ships, of course – is to bring them to Miami or San Francisco to spend their money partying it up in our ports. That means jobs, jobs, jobs in shipyards, bars, hotels, restaurants, all flooded with foreign sailors looking for a good time. Not to mention all the added jobs for law enforcement making sure those foreign sailors don't get out of the port into the rest of the country. I'm not an idiot.

We'd do the same on the other side too, sailing to Hong Kong or St Petersburg for some of our liberty calls. Of course, the tension would be pretty high at first, but over time as these sort of things became more common, our peoples would get more used to each other and we would finally have some adults on all sides who'd spent significant time in the other one's company and had some fond memories of the other one's homeland. Only once that sort of pattern was established could we really be friends and cooperative partners with the next most powerful nations after us. At the same time, we need to crank up our almost-dormant diplomatic corps, perhaps a new agency within the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence, to not only keep their governments on our sides but as a scalpel to carefully keep them divided from each other. It would take a lot of effort, especially for us, but I think it would be worth it in the long run to see a world dominated by the US, Russia, China, and the UK all standing together arm-in-arm, following our ultimate lead of course, because the alternative is that we keep staring each other down in rising tension while we all still have our thousands of nuclear weapons.

As to all the various areas that my plan pushes outside our sphere of influence, I would be actively encouraging one of the other superpowers to take over management of those areas – especially the Muslim world – so that we can just get out of it altogether. My position on Israel is already clear; you can read that post if you want the details. As far as securing our oil interests, just because I'd pull our military out of the area doesn't mean I'd abandon our business interests. They'd just be defended by professional mercenaries, and contract troops from the other superpowers wrangled by our diplomatic corps and paid for by their own governments instead of risking the lives of our own sailors and soldiers to do the same job.

Final note: South Korea can take care of themselves. I'd pull out the “tripwire” forces. I think there's more than enough pressure on them from two enormous fleets up and down the Pacific Ocean to keep them in line, besides which I think if everyone else stayed out of it South Korea would win their fight anyway. And even if I'm wrong about that, that's China's problem, not ours.


[2018 EDIT: Several people who would know have told me that my energy ideas are dumb, and I don't have any business formulating ideas about something I don't understand. So just ignore Step 5.]

Step 5: (At Least Survey to) Fix the Energy Crisis

I've already explained my thoughts on global warming in exhaustive detail. I'd have to conduct one of those survey polls of the population to see what action the people would like us to take, then go with that. I'd really like to see some cities and states try different options and see which one works the best before we try adopting a national standard. I've also already covered the oil issue previously. Those really aren't the parts I think the president needs to lead the way on.

The biggest challenge facing us when it comes to energy on all fronts is how to get out of coal without hurting either the coal companies or the coal miners. As much as I believe in nuclear and hydro power, I think the best lateral move from coal would be geothermal power. We can even convert coal plants to geothermal plants: we just have to dig deep enough holes under them first. The best part for the economy is that once we reduced our own demand for coal, we could still keep digging it up to export it.

There is one thing that has to be checked out before we tackle geothermal power, though. The reason we have an atmosphere is because the liquid iron of the inner core rotates inside the solid iron of the outer core, which produces our planet's magnetic field. It's only because of the strength of that magnetic field that the sun's radiation can't blow away our atmosphere. That's a lot riding on the nature of that core. The potential problem is that the only thing keeping the inner core liquid is the enormous pressure being applied to it by the weight of the mantle and the crust. If we're going to bore holes through the crust, we need to know in advance how that venting will affect that pressure. If we somehow let enough pressure off the core to let it solidify, we would lose our atmosphere, and by the time we knew about it we wouldn't be able to do anything about it. So as dangerous as global warming might be, the danger of geothermal energy gone wrong is the complete destruction of our planet's ability to support life.

Either way, once we have tons of electricity flowing, the main role of the president is to encourage the states to put them to some good use. It would be good to see a lot more public transportation, especially when it comes to cities, so that cars would not be as necessary as they are. Cars are a part of our culture, and I'm certainly not calling for getting rid of them or getting rid of oil; just reducing the degree that they're needed to get anything and everything done in this country would be a major improvement. But the president and the federal government's role in that should be encouragement, not legislating. I would shine a spotlight on the states and companies that go along with this, as well as those that refuse to, and let the citizens make their own decisions. It's not the federal government's job to force that sort of thing on the citizens.

There you have it. Those five things would be my main goals to improve our country if I was the president. It's probably a bit ambitious to assume I could get any of them done, but that's why there aren't more than five. I think that's the most I could get done in 4 years nevertheless, and I don't think I'd run for reelection unless one of my survey polls told me the people really wanted me to.

Political/Personal: Quick Answers to Hard Questions

Unlike my "Big Six" post where I discussed some issues I just thought were big social questions, these are some of the more topical questions where either a) I've been asked my opinion already or b) everyone else is putting in their two cents, so I thought I ought to put mine in too. You might call them the "Current Five."


Today's topics are: Transgender Issues, Gang Violence, Syrian Refugees, 2016 Presidential Election, and Celebrity Deaths.


1) Transgender Issues   This is a very muddy topic for me, and I'd like to state at the outset that I don't have a clear opinion on it. It's known to some of my close friends and family (cat's out of the bag for everyone else) that I went through a little crossdressing phase myself after college. Between the severe mental illness, heavy drinking, and deep sexual confusion I was struggling with at the time, it seemed like there for a while I was willing to try a little bit of everything except for dating other guys. But there's a phase and there's deciding that's just who you are. I can't understand that idea at all, so I pretty much just leave it alone as far as moral judgment goes. Some people would say I am/was transgender for wearing lipstick and putting on eye shadow (the wrong way, as it turns out - eye shadow goes on the upper eyelids, not on the cheekbones) back when I was confused.
There is one thing I want to at least call out on logical grounds: when we were talking about gay people choosing to follow their biological programming, the cry was that biology was insurmountable. Gay people had no choice because they had to do what was natural for them, no matter how distasteful straight people found it. Now we're faced with a group that says the way they were born was wrong, and they have to overcome that biology. I'm not saying either group is right or wrong, and Lord knows I'm a walking paradox myself, but it's worth pointing out that there is one here that nobody seems to acknowledge.
Now the practical issue that's been politicized and blown way out of proportion is which bathroom transgender people are supposed to use. I wish I had written a book on that 10 years ago, because I called it. I knew that was going to be the big one, and I was right. We had to deal with this one at work last year because we had a transgender employee for about 9 months, and while everyone felt a little weird about having to change our thinking, nobody really gave her a hard time about it. We had hired more female employees than we usually had anyway, so my boss just picked one of the two bathrooms and stuck a "Women" sign on it. Since we were long used to just using whichever one was empty, it didn't feel like there was a real gender assignation involved, so nobody felt all that weird about our trans employee using it anyway, and so that was that, as far as we were concerned.
Now, as a manager, even though I wasn't her boss, I was dreading some sort of confrontation about "refusing to accept her" or something like that, and I tried to reason out a good parallel: Since I'm a pretty religious man, as you know if you've read any of my other posts, I asked myself, "What if I became a monk?" Suppose I changed my life in front of my coworkers and, particularly, started demanding everyone else call me "Brother" instead of the name they were used to, and started wearing slightly different clothes with my tonsured scalp and wearing a friar's rope through my belt loops in place of my leather belt. Nobody could really argue that I had done anything wrong; that wouldn't violate dress code for example, and my company is pretty open about putting 'faith and family first' and work second, within reason. But it would still be a little unreasonable of me to expect that nobody would find the change a little shocking, not to mention forgetting to call me Brother for a while until they got used to it. These were some of the arguments I'd prepared to explain to our trans employee that just because people forgot to call her by her new name or gave her some funny looks didn't mean we didn't accept her, or disapproved; it was just a little jarring when we'd hired and trained "Jack" and now we had to get used to "Jill."
As far as what everyone else thinks about the bathroom issue, I don't have a good answer. I'd be inclined to let them use whichever one they want, or just to have more single-occupancy bathrooms and everyone just use the same one. I understand a lot of people disapprove, but I don't know if there's more to it than just the general rejection of things changing. To that, I always want to say: get over it. Things change. If you don't have a good reason for it, you can't expect the rest of us to cling to the world you remember just because you don't like the new one. We're coming up on a year since gay marriage was legalized and the country hasn't been smitten with any plagues that I've noticed. Let people do what they want, whether it's something you would do or not. That sums up my attitude to almost every choice, in fact.


2) Gang Violence   This one has come up a lot recently because of what almost amounts to a gang war in my hometown. Luckily this one's easy for me, because I've had a plan for this one for years: treat gang wars like wars. When there's a gang war, declare the place a war zone. Deploy the national guard (or even the army) for general order purposes, an let the gangs fight it out. For gang members killing other gang members, they're enemy combatants, so don't count them as murders or in the area's crime figures. Civilians and the military presence wouldn't interfere as long as it sticks to gang-to-gang violence. When civilians (non-combatants) get killed, bang! you're looking at war crime charges. When government forces are harmed, if it's accidental, that's a war crime, and if it's intentional, it's terrorism. The only gray area is with people who might have been gang members or not, or in a recent example whether a gang member's girlfriend counts as a valid target. In those cases you need a little investigation into whether they should or should not be considered a combatant. The military already has that sort of procedure so it shouldn't be too hard to adapt. Then I'd say you can kill the opposing gang all you want, but aim better. If you don't, you'll be tried for crimes against humanity, and we'll have troops on every corner to make sure you don't get away with it. Suddenly there's no need to stop the violence; just let it shoot itself out.


3) Syrian Refugees   If you don't already know, my immigration policy is on the left of the most liberal view you've ever heard. I'd let everyone in, including known criminals, and just keep tabs on them to see if they're looking for a new start or just staking out new territory. Of course, I'd have a zero tolerance policy on immigrant crime: first offense, out you go. Even (reasonable) suspicion ought to be enough to get a non-citizen deported, green card marriage, anchor babies, or not. But that little fascist streak aside, I'd have a totally open border. This same policy fits perfectly with the Syrian refugee trouble. Take them all in, and make it clear: you screw up, you're out. There are definitely criminals and terrorists hiding in with them, but I don't want to let one affect the other. Let everyone in, then throw out the guilty. That'll solve everything. And if a few Americans get hurt or killed before we catch them, those are our martyrs. Those are the people we lose to stand up for our principles, and we'll memorialize them as heroes of the Republic, who died so that we need not live in fear or oppression. I'm tired of having to choose. And before you bring it up, that's how I'd feel even if it was my mother, brother, or friend. If you compromise your principles when they become inconvenient, they're not really principles.


4) 2016 Election   That last sentence transitions nicely into this topic. You see, I am against all four of the main candidates. I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and as Andy Rooney remarked back when I was just a toddler, that usually makes me hated by both. My problem with all four (except Hillary) is that they're waving the anti-establishment flag to get elected. We've got two Senators and a billionaire talking about taking on The Man, and I just can't swallow it. They are The Man. None of that means I like Hillary any better; she's The Man too, just a little more honest about it. I can't support any of them. I've seen this too many times. In 2004 (the first election I was old enough to vote in) I voted for Bush. In 2008, I voted for Obama. That was enough to convince me it doesn't matter which side you support; they both suck. In 2012, I voted for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, and that's the only one so far I don't regret. If we all did that, the real establishment would fall, even the ones pretending they're not the establishment.
The only person I can think of I might really support (if she would run) is Elizabeth Warren. She's a lot like Bernie Sanders without the socialism, but more importantly she didn't just start saying the right things when it became fashionable; she's been saying "outsider" things even when it cost her. That at least suggests she really believes it. Although, let's face it, she's in office, so she knows how to play the game, and it might all be a long-con political ploy. But at the risk of seeming a smidgen optimistic I think she really might do what she says she will. I don't trust ANY of the others to do ANY of the stuff they're promising. Can you name a single campaign promise that any president has ever kept?
That said, my prediction is a victory for Hillary, possibly with Sanders as her running mate. The reason for this is the same reason Obama won in 2008 and Bush in 2004: the other side is too divided, and she at least has the support of the core of her own party, something none of the others can say. That means she'll have the lion's share of the money and big name endorsements behind her, and like it or not those sort of things sway public opinion a lot more than Trump-like promises or Warren-like principles.


5) Celebrity Deaths   Compared to the others, this topic is more of a footnote. Prince died the other day (as did a wrestler and an actress I was superficially aware of), and I'm learning a lot of my friends held Prince on the same level of talent and accomplishment as Aretha Franklin or Chuck Berry. As the sort of music fan who would put him on the same level as Duran Duran or Britney Spears - in that I've heard about 5 songs and like one, sort-of - this was a bit of a surprise to me. Now the thing that happens with pretty much any celebrity death, from Robin Williams last time to Michael Jackson a few years back and on and on, is that a lot of their fans are really upset while those of us who didn't really know much about them don't consider it much of an event. What I'd like to say is that I respect everyone's grief and I don't want to trod on it, but I don't share your sense of loss. In fact I'm a little hopeful that now that he's dead his record company might be able to upload his music to YouTube where I can finally hear it. So, if I seem insensitive to your feelings, it's not that. It's that we're in the paradigm where you've lost a dear, close friend; one who I've only met twice and I just can't be as upset as you are about it.

Political, Religious, Personal: The US, Israel, and the World

I had a dream of doing one single blog entry that would encompass all of my political beliefs so I could get them all down I one place and, in keeping with this blog's original purpose, never have to explain myself again. I would just give people the link and let them read it and get back to me. But then when I decided to start by defining terms, I was going to end up with around 20 pages of definitions, so I've decided to instead just keep putting things down as they come up (sort of), and if I change my opinion on something I'll do an edit. Today's topic, which has actually been brought up on and off for the past several months, is Israel, and why I, unlike a lot of people with bumper stickers it seems, don't stand with it.

It's really hard to know where to start this explanation, because all my various opinions on US foreign policy and my own religious attitudes are connected to it. I'm just going to have to start somewhere, and if you find it a bit confusing, it's probably a result of the fact that this is a complex issue, and I must admit I'm nowhere near the writer I used to be.

I think it's probably better if I state the religious part first, because the political part comes from that.

I have had several discussions with American Christians who for one reason or another think that the Jews are still God's chosen people. Now I have to admit that this is strictly an interpretation question. After years of study, I'm no closer to being able to answer the question of God's opinion towards Jews in a post-Christian world. The Bible makes it clear that Christians are supposed to be spiritual successors of the Jews, sanctified through Jesus under the new law as the Jews were through Moses under the old law. There are also several passages that state that Christians are co-heirs with the Jews, and supposed to become “spiritually circumcised” in ways that make it look like both doctrines are supposed to continue. There are also several passages that state that Christians are supposed to put aside Jewish doctrine and tradition and separate themselves to Christ regardless of what the Jews do.

Now, my interpretation for a long time has been that there was a lot of muddying of the waters in the first century. Most of the Christians in the churches the scriptural letters are written to were Jews, and the conflict that Paul in particular writes about the most is how Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians are supposed to make things work side-by-side. The Jewish tradition at the time required them to be so separate from the Gentiles that Jesus wasn't even allowed to enter a Gentile household to heal someone, and Peter required three visions from God before he would go preach to a Gentile convert-in-the-making. Plus you had former Jews and former pagans trying to worship under the doctrine of Jesus, and there are a lot of cases where the Jews are told they ought to continue to keep the Mosaic law, while the Gentiles are not, but are required to give up their pagan traditions. Like I said, it was a messy time, and it took several letters from apostles to get it together, so it's understandably a little confusing now.

Going on that interpretation, I don't think the Jews are God's chosen people anymore. I think their “chosen” status was transferred to Christians, and that the promise made to Abraham concerning his descendants no longer refers to his biological offspring because Jesus transferred it to his spiritual successors. But I have to admit that you can read the passages the other way if you're so minded. Now I don't understand why anyone who thinks that way would be a Christian instead of converting to Judaism, but that's a question for another day.

Following from that though, if the Jews are no longer God's chosen people, then Christians are not under any particular obligation to them; certainly no more than to any other group. I've stated before elsewhere that I don't think we're on the right side in the struggle between Judaism and Islam for example. Muslims have more in common with Christians than Jews do; at least Muslims accept the divinity of Jesus's teachings even if they don't accept the divinity of Jesus Himself.

Where things start to separate for me, though, is when we get to the state of Israel. Let's stipulate for a moment that Jews really are a special group to God: how does it follow that Christians have a duty to preserve a country for them? I can find no scriptural evidence for that at all. In fact, God was the one who let the original kingdom of Israel split into two states, and then let them both be taken by foreign powers, warning them in advance it would happen because they'd been so sinful in idolatry without repentance. The Babylonians conquered Judah and took the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (with some Levites) into captivity; the Assyrians captured the rest of the kingdom and annihilated the other tribes. When the Medes and Persians captured the former Babylonian empire, they let the Jews go back to their homeland, and the Alexandrian dynasty that took over after that didn't bother them either. But God still let that restored Jewish state get captured by the Romans just a few hundred years later. After Jesus's resurrection, just before He ascended to heaven, His own followers asked if He would restore the kingdom to them. Jesus just sighed and said they still didn't get it. It seems pretty clear to me God wouldn't have let Israel be conquered a second time, particularly since the Jews had not gone to idol worship this time, unless it had fulfilled its purpose and wasn't needed anymore.

If God really doesn't care whether there's an earthly Jewish state (which He doesn't seem to, given how little He's done to preserve one for them), then why do we as Christians care one way or the other? I'm not anti-Israel, or anti-Semitic, or whatever other charges you'd care to level at me. I'm fine with the Jews having their own state. Why not? The Germans do, the Russians do, the Chinese do, the Arabs do, the Turks do, and so forth. But why is it our duty as Christians to make darn sure the Jews have their own state more than any of those other groups? Even if you buy that they're still the chosen of God, which I don't, why do the other chosen of God need to risk our own safety, liberty, lives, global reputation, etc. in defense of any earthly, worldly, political state? That's not rhetorical. I don't have a satisfactory answer. I might change my opinion if someone could give me one.

Where things really go their separate ways for me is when we move beyond the religious questions of how Christians and Jews ought to behave towards each other and enter the political world. I have mentioned previously my admiration for Henry Kissinger, and my endorsement of realpolitik in practice. I ought to clarify how that applies here before I get into the serious discussion of why we ought to drop Israel as an ally, but I want to say one final thing on the nature of religion when it comes to nations: America is a country; it's not a person. It does not have a soul to save or lose. As an institution, the duty of the USA and its government is to its citizens, not to doing the right thing. America is fully justified in doing evil to others if it serves the needs of its people, and this applies to every other country in the world as well. If we want “the right thing” and “the needs of the people” to coincide, that's up to us. It would take massive political reform to really make those decisions viable again, but that's also a topic for another day. For now, just understand that I don't judge America (or any other nation) as good or evil on the same criteria that I use to judge myself (or another individual human being).

To clarify my stated position, I believe it's right (or at least defensible) for nations to make their friends and allies based on real world considerations like who has material resources, who has a strong military, and such rather than more idealistic concerns like who's torturing their own people or using the wrong form of government. If you take an honest look at even our history, let alone world history, what you see is that those are the sorts of reasons we make those decisions by anyway. Because America tries to be idealistic, we end up lying to ourselves a lot in ways other countries don't have to. Once America decides it needs a country, it has to rationalize that they are a “good guy” nation, no matter what the reality. A lot of our problems nowadays come from the hypocrisy this rationalizing caused us during the Cold War. We propped up or even installed a lot of “bad guy” regimes because the people we supported opposed communism, and that was enough for us to tell ourselves they weren't evil. We were even telling their victims that, while insisting to ourselves that those citizens must have done something to be slow-roasted by hot coals over wire cot frames a la the Shah of Iran, or that the ethnic cleansing campaign couldn't have been as bad as we were hearing, as with Saddam Hussein. If we had been more honest with ourselves and with other countries then, we probably wouldn't be involved in a lot of the fighting we're involved in now. What's more, the war in Iraq, for example, could have been over and done with by now if we'd been honest about needing to defend our oil interests – which I see as a legitimate reason for a nation to go to war – rather than attempting to wrap it up in positive idealistic motivations. We went to war to avenge our dead from September 11th (another motivation that's fine on a national level but personally abhorrent, although not one we needed to lie about, strangely enough), and to depose the corrupt regime of Saddam Hussein after we'd spent 30 years supporting it. The thing is, it's now the idealistic wrapping paper that's holding us in the fight. Saddam's dead; Bin Laden's dead; al-Qaeda is defunct; the Taliban is all but destroyed; and we still have our oil. The only thing keeping us there is the idea that we have to rebuild these “liberated” nations, which their own citizens still see as us occupying their country and dictating how they live, which is breeding more of the same violence we keep saying we have to stop. To put it briefly, you can't put a fire out with gasoline, no matter how many times you write 'water' on the gas can.

So, our double-faced attitude to realpolitik is getting us into more of the same trouble it got us into in the first place. How does that relate to the state of Israel? Because America, for reasons going all the way back to our national attitudes before WWII, has placed Israel squarely in the “good guy” camp. We used to nationally support the phrase “ethnic self-determinism”; the idea that any and every ethnic group ought to be able to form its own state and govern itself. Hitler used this very argument in his own defense of his initial expansions: “The Sudetenland is full of Germans who would like to be part of Germany. If Czechoslovakia would let them vote on it, they'd vote to leave and join Germany. We're just standing up for their right to be with their own people.” It was the same argument we used when we supported letting Yugoslavia break up into its various component pieces, and to some extent to letting the Soviet Union break up. The thing is, we couldn't stand on principle and break the Soviet Union up because, unlike any other country we've dealt with in 70 years, if we tried to destroy the Soviet Union, they had the ability to destroy us back. If we'd really been the fervent idealists we said we were, we'd have risked that total annihilation to liberate the Turks, Uygurs, Bulgars, Magyars, Romani, and various non-Russian Slavs that were all held by the Soviet regime.

When it comes to a country that is every bit as dangerous as we are, we realize it's not worth dying for. When it comes to a collection of countries that, even combined, couldn't attack us even if their lives depended on it, well, we'll back our ally no matter what. We'll bravely stand on our side of the respective oceans and tell the whole Middle East that whatever Israel does, we're behind them. Alone, Israel is like any other country in the region. With its good buddy the USA standing behind it, it's more or less granted superpower status by association.

Now, I've already talked about why, morally, I don't think there's any reason for the Christians to help the Jews over any other group, but I don't see why America has any moral obligation to support the state of Israel where it is on ideological grounds either. A brief look at the Internet says there are around 6,212,000 Jews in Israel as of 2014; compared to 6,500,000 in the US (some estimates as high as 6,750,000). It would honestly make more sense, if the US wants to support an independent Jewish state, for us to declare one somewhere here than to keep supporting them over there. I could get behind that, morally and politically. There is nothing wrong with us giving up some of our land to create a Jewish state; particularly since we have more Jews than Israel does! On top of which, Israel was created by the UN by giving them someone else's land. It was just proclaimed, just like that. No one ever thought to ask any of the people already living there if they minded being part of a specifically Jewish state that was going to set up right there where they already lived. This violates that same principle of ethnic self-determinism, because the majority Arab ethnic group that was going to be displaced didn't have any say in the matter. It wasn't like the division between India and Pakistan, for example, where both sides agreed that there needed to be separate states, they worked out a treaty, and they separated. This was flat-out strong-arming: one group told a second group that a third group got to have their land, and a fourth heavily-armed group was backing them up. Imagine some people you've never met show up unannounced and start moving into your house. The homeowner's association said they could because the people you bought the house from had stolen it from your new housemates' great-great-grandparents. And if you have a problem with that, you can either move out or just be quiet, because the police are enforcing their claim over yours. So from its foundation right up to the minute, we've been nothing but hypocritical on the subject.

So, to summarize, I don't agree with the US continuing to support the state of Israel where it is on any level. God gave it to them in the Old Testament, but then God also took it away in the Old Testament. The UN, citing ethnic self-determinism, gave it to them in violation of ethnic self-determinism. The US, citing a shaky interpretation of the Bible, continues to support this when it would honestly make better sense politically to side with their enemies, and be more justified morally to give them some of our land instead.

Single Issue: Fifteen More Underused EDH Combos, and Then Some

It has been a while since my first Magic post, and I've thought up or remembered some more combos, so I thought I'd do a new one.

As before, this post will feature some copyrighted material. My use of it should be protected under the same sort of laws that allow for fanfictions and other fan tribute creations. The name Magic: the Gathering, the mana symbols, the card templates and designs, set names, setting names, card names, and all major character names (if I've mentioned any) are copyright 1993-2013 Wizards of the Coast.

Also like last time, some of these combos are not original. So if you think you've seen this somewhere else before, you may well be right.

15. Blind Dousing



Blind Seer and Douse

Effect - 2UU: Counter target spell.
Combo Type - Reusable Counterspell.
Pros - Counter anything as long as you have the mana.
Cons - Aside from the demands it puts on your mana supply, the only real drawback is that it's a defensive combo and doesn't win the game on its own. Obviously the better it works, the more aggression you'll draw.

14. Propaganda War


Propaganda and War's Toll

Effect - Other players can't attack unless they attack with everything, can't attack you unless they pay, and can't pay unless they pay everything.
Combo Type - Shield Effect/Complementary Effects
Pros - Fairly straightforward, cheap, consecutive turn combo; both cards work fine independently even without the other.
Cons - Useless if they can afford to pay the cost; purely defensive; and irritating enough to draw aggression.

13. Gideon's Field
This combo is one of a few in this entry that seems too obvious to miss, since both of them came out in the same set. But I've not seen them in use together at all, except by me. There's not even a lot of online chatter about them.



Gideon Jura (1st ability) and Lightmine Field

Effect - Force attack, then punish the attack
Combo Type - Control and Damage
Pros - Reusable, and possibly clears the board of opponents' creatures and keeps them gone. Gideon can attack for 6 when not drawing other creatures into the field, and isn't hit himself. It doesn't discriminate against flying or even unblockable creatures.
Cons - Large creatures, or small numbers of creatures, will slip through alive, as will indestructible creatures and the small number with protection from white.

12. Sudden Pyroclasm
I'm well aware that Sudden Spoiling is used plenty. That's why it keeps getting printed in Commander products. However I've only seen it used defensively, stopping attacks and blocking combos and things. It has enormous offensive potential to, and that's what I'm highlighting.



Sudden Spoiling and Pyroclasm

Effect - Wipes out all creatures a single player controls.
Combo Type - Destruction
Pros - Destroys all the chosen player's creatures. Works even on indestructible creatures, pro black, pro red, hexproof, shroud, and other hard to kill creatures, including the Eldrazi for example. You can play Sudden Spoiling in response to Pyroclasm and wipe everything out at once.
Cons - Only kills everything one opponent controls, but Pyroclasm hits everyone, so makes you a potential target. Doesn't work on untargetable players. Single use, not repeatable. While it will probably alter the board state dramatically, it won't give you the advantage on your own. You still need something else to follow it up.

11. Archetype of the Dragon



Archetype of Imagination and Form of the Dragon

Effect - Creatures can't attack you.
Combo Type - Shield Effect
Pros - Nothing can attack you, and you strike out for 5 every turn.
Cons - Your life total being eternally at 5, you're vulnerable to any spell (or combination of spells) capable of doing 5 damage to you in any one turn. It's also rather slow to implement.

10. Wasting Slash



Waste Not and Mind Slash

Effect - Keep creatures out of opponents' hands and keep your resources stocked
Combo Type - Discard
Pros - Easily reusable against creatures in your opponents' hands, since you can toss the zombie token to do it again. With other creatures, or a token generator, you can keep everyone's hands suppressed.
Cons - Only moves at sorcery speed, so easy to interrupt.

9. Potent Armor
I have seen this in use once, in a Zur the Enchanter deck, but it has more potential than I've seen people achieving with it.



Empyrial Armor and Necropotence

Effect - Put cards in your hand and translate that to a large creature.
Combo Type - Draw, Pump, and Complementary Effects
Pros - Very flexible. Put on a lifelink creature, you could have a huge creature, a lot of life, and an enormous hand all at once. Put on your commander, you could attack for a lethal stroke. On anything really you still have a big creature and cards in hand.
Cons - Vulnerable to all sorts of removal. Life isn't as precious in EDH as it is in other formats, but there are still limits to how many times you can try to use it before you won't be able to anymore. You will probably need to allow for Venser's Journal or other cards to keep everything you draw in your hand.

8. Angel's Scepter



Isochron Scepter and Angel's Grace

Effect - You can't lose the game
Combo Type - Shield Effect
Pros - Of all the various cards you can imprint on Isochron Scepter, Angel's Grace seems to be the most useful. This combo is fast, simple, and once you get it, your opponents cannot win until they deal with it. It's cheap to maintain and easy to use.
Cons - It's got a bull's eye on it, and everyone will want to destroy it (or even steal it away from you).
Like all shield effects, it's defensive, and won't win the game for you. Additionally, you can only use it for one turn in the rotation, so if it's a five-player game, for example, you're a vulnerable target for four turns.

7. Stasis Locker
This is another "classic combo" from my high school days that doesn't see a lot of use anymore. I included Kismet because that was the card to use then. Frozen Æther works just as well, but it didn't exist yet. Turn 2-3, Chronatog, Turn 4, Kismet, Turn 5, Stasis, then you just skip your remaining turns while your opponents are unable to do anything until they run out of cards.



Stasis, Kismet and/or Frozen Æther, and Chronatog

Effect - Lock the Board/Win the Game
Combo Type - Game Winner
Pros - Wins the game, and incredibly difficult to break out of.
Cons - In addition to not doing anything about permanents already on the board when it locks, there are a small handful of very common cards that can short-circuit it. Naturalize, for example, can break it at least long enough for someone to deal with the rest of it.

6. Memnarch's Realm
Another very obvious combo that I just don't see anyone using.

Memnarch, Mycosynth Lattice, Darksteel Forge, and, optionally, Nevinyrral's Disk

Effect - Control and/or destroy everything
Combo Type - Domination/Board Wipe
Pros - You are almost certain to win if you pull it off. With Nevinyrral's Disk, you will keep everyone else's permanents clear, including lands, thereby effectively stopping anyone else from casting spells.
Cons - It's incredibly slow to set up, and will be obvious, especially once people know what your combo pieces are. The more successful it is, the harder people will try to stop it, so you're less likely to combo out in successive games, so you'll need the rest of your deck to compensate both in speed and defense.

5. Maniacal Mirror
The main thrust of this one is both obvious and widely known, so I almost didn't include it. However, I don't know of anyone using it, so it's worthy of the term 'underused.' Also, it seems like I'm the only one who ever saw any potential in Mirror of Fate, so here's a use for it.

Mirror of Fate/Leveler, and Laboratory Maniac (plus any blue instant that lets you draw a card)

Effect - Win the Game
Combo Type - Game Winner
Pros - Almost certain victory
Cons - Vulnerable to instant-speed removers, and may be slow to set up. Also, makes you a target in successive games and when people know what your combo pieces are.

4. Cackling Arcanist

Elite Arcanist, Cackling Counterpart, and any of a number of good instants

Effect - Produces tokens of any creature you control (and especially more Elite Arcanists) allowing you to play reusable instant effects ad nauseum
Combo Type - Token Production
Pros - Allows you to copy pretty much any and all instants multiple times; flexible and customizable;
allows any other colors to blend, and hard to answer.
Cons - Vulnerable target for removal, limited to one use per turn, requires a good percentage of your deck be devoted to maintaining it, and requires a large amount of available mana.

3. Bazaar Persecutor
This is another combo that was so obvious it should have been used more when it was available in standard. I had a heated discussion with someone who insisted it didn't matter if you couldn't lose if you were taking 6 damage per turn. The key part in using it effectively is to make sure you don't give the Persecutor to someone until after they're below 1 life or otherwise in a position to lose the game as soon as it passes out of your possession.



Bazaar Trader, Abyssal Persecutor, and Steel Golem and/or Grid Monitor

Effect - You will try to beat someone to death with the Persecutor, and then give it to them so they lose the game.
Combo Type - Creature Combos
Pros - Bazaar Trader in particular is flexible, and you can send all sorts of weird things to your opponents to deal with. Giving another player Steel Golem or Grid Monitor, for example, stops them from playing any creatures. Jinxed Ring or Jinxed Idol would fit well in the deck too.
Cons - You still have to attack and kill your opponent before giving them the Persecutor, with all the inherent risks. It's also a potential rules headache. I had to look up how this works, but the only way to beat every other player at once is to get them all below 1 life (or any other losing condition) and then transfer the Persecutor. That player will then lose the game, at which point the Persecutor will be exiled (See rule 800.4) and everyone else will then lose the game. Also, the "donate" effect is hard to use in these colors, since the other cards that contribute to it are blue and/or white.

2. "Blacklight" Cluster Combo
This isn't so much a five-card combo as a two-card one that is open to further enhancement. Other cards, such as Northern Paladin, could have fit as well.

Darkest Hour and Light of Day, with Absolute Grace and Celestial Dawn, and featuring Maddening Imp

Effect - Basic Combo - Creatures can't attack or block. Enhanced Combo - Your creatures can, and have protection from everyone else's creatures. With Maddening Imp - Kill everyone else's creatures.
Combo Type - Complex Complementary Effects
Pros - Effective defense in a creatureless deck; these cards fit easily into any white/black deck without disrupting a main strategy; will win you the game if not disrupted; basic combo is simple, cheap, easy to use, and the cards are not hard to get.
Cons - Apart from the obvious difficulty of pulling off multiple card combos, the timing is critical. You can't play Celestial Dawn, for example, until Darkest Hour is already on the battlefield, or your creatures will be as trapped as everyone else's. Put together wrong, creatures will have protection from creatures, including themselves, which means nothing will be able to block.

1. Squirrel Bombardment
The elements of this were mentioned in the last one, but I though I'd put them together this time.

Earthcraft, Squirrel Nest, and Goblin Bombardment

Effect - Kill the other players and win the game
Combo Type - Kill Combo
Pros - Once assembled, you will have infinite squirrels which will translate to infinite damage, and win the game at instant speed. Can't be disrupted even at instant speed because you can produce another infinite tokens and sacrifice them for infinite damage in response to anything. The whole combo requires only 3 lands.
Cons - While not vulnerable to removal once completed, players can shut it down if they see you're about to combo out. Like all the game-winning combos listed, while it might win you one game players are going to be watching for it the second time. Also, without white or black, it'll be quite hard to tutor for the enchantments necessary, giving your opponents time to mount a defense. Players who can't be targeted or damaged will survive.

Bonus: Two Massively Overlooked EDH Cards

Enchanted Evening

Enchanted Evening, seen here with some of its potential combo cards, sets up all sorts of fun stuff that can outright win you the game, or at least improve your position. Combined with Tranquil Grove, for example, you have the whole battlefield hostage with a board wipe on a stick. You can influence players to do what you want under pain of destroying everything. Or you can play and sacrifice an Aura Thief to just straight up steal every permanent in play. Given that it plays into all sorts of different strategies, I'm surprised every deck with white and blue in its commander's color identity doesn't use it.

 



Scandalmonger

Scandalmonger isn't only ignored, but based on the comments I see on various MTG sites, it's positively held in contempt. Now, while it's not all that great in two-player, it mixes with all sorts of things in multiplayer. Think about recursion. The whole point is to get as much stuff into your graveyard as possible, and they all run black. Throw in Heartstone, and you've basically got an unlimited Mind Twist. With Liliana's Caress and/or Megrim, everyone else gets damage for it. Sangromancer, Spiritual Focus, and Confessor turn it into life gain, Madness cards work on their own, and with Library of Leng you don't have to lose anything you want to put back in your library. Everyone hitting everyone else, and only you can benefit. So why not combine it with almost any idea and wreck your opponents?