Dave's Daily Dose 10/13/2021
THE BACKLOG IS ALMOST DONE!
Seriously, guys, we’ve only got a dozen items left, most from this week, which is far less than we had 3 weeks ago. The Process Is Working!
One depressing fact is that although third parties are a natural constituency to recruit into the Ranked-Choice or multiparty reform fight, they’re also the most self-selected to be least likely to admit they aren’t special unicorns who can overcome the spoiler effect through sheer plucky stick-to-it-ive-ness. They spend most of their time blathering on like idiots about how they’re denied ballot access, when existing ballot access thresholds would be mere speed bumps if the parties themselves actually stood a chance in First-Past-The-Post elections.
I spend a lot of time going on about how various things don’t have to be zero-sum. But media narrative already has an inherently zero-sum upper bound: there are only so many eyeball-hours in a day to spew content at, and that bound ONLY responds to “the birth rate of roughly 18 years ago”.
All of that is to say, it genuinely is valid to complain that the media spends all its time on stupid narratives like “Dems In Disarray”.
The national myth of compromise is a load of horseshit. It’s more like the Republic has spent the last 200 years playing Russian Roulette from time to time, and only survived due to a national tradition of leaders finally acting sanely to save us from existential collapse, but only after literally every incentive in the system itself drove them to the absolute brink of insanity.
Happy Hump Day!