“And when you engage in such juvenile attacks on the intelligence of the people who disagree with your political conclusions, how long do you expect to be able to do that without it eventually affecting your sales?”

1. Dude, are you new here or something? I’ve been doing this sort of thing here for over a decade. This isn’t exactly new behavior. The choicest bits of this sort of thing, in fact, have been made into a book, which has won awards and is selling very nicely indeed, thanks for asking. And all the while the fiction is chugging along at a perfectly fine clip, and has been since I started writing it. So the answer to your question, I suppose, is that it already does affect my sales: it provides a net gain.

2. As I expect you are new, please read the site disclaimer. It should clear up many things.

3. If in fact you can’t get over the idea that I don’t actually care that sometimes what I write here might hurt your feelings in some way or another, by all means stop buying my books and reading my words. I celebrate your choice.

I disagree with your statement that Obama is “moderate-lefty in the current US political spectrum.” You attribute moderation to Obama that is mere pragmatism, a function of his recognition that he can’t get enacted the more radical changes that he’s previously endorsed throughout his career. That makes him a partially failed far leftie, not a moderate leftie.

So which version of me is stupid, Mr. Scalzi? The one who likes your books, or the one who disagrees with your prescriptive IQ test (which depends, in turn, on acquiescence with your politics)?

And when you engage in such juvenile attacks on the intelligence of the people who disagree with your political conclusions, how long do you expect to be able to do that without it eventually affecting your sales? I’m perfectly happy to buy books written by those who have different politics than mine, less so to buy them from those who can’t be even minimally respectful in expressing their own political views.

Couple of ideas:
1) Publicly-funded elections. If you can get enough signatures to get on the ballot, you get funded. No contributions. No “war-chest” — spend it now or loose it, cause it ain’t your money and you don’t get to keep it. (Special this-time-only exception: Incumbents who chose not to run, get to keep what they have. G’bye, now!)

2) If you can’t vote, you don’t get to make political ads. Yes, Bill Gates, Oprah, Larry Ellison, et al. can. It’s their personal money. Spend it on rovers for Jupiter, if they want. Olbermann & O’Reilly can say whatever they want. Their job is to be entertainingly political. (Yeah, those jobs’ll proliferate — and become dilute.) Some guy that PETA gave money to, to purchase ads? OK, but he’s going to have one helluva tax bill. Goldman, Sachs? Corporations can’t vote, remember?

3) Based on Michigan’s Legislature, term-limits are not a good idea. As someone wrote above, the most-experienced lawmakers in Lansing are the Lobbyists. Besides, they won’t be necessary. POTUS should get to run for as many consecutive terms as she wants, to.

None of this, though, addresses what I consider the central problem of a Republic: It’s really tough to get re-elected on a platform of “I didn’t break anything!” Which is why the Founders made it so difficult to change anything. They knew our Reps. would be under enormous pressure to monkey with stuff. We, the voters, will have to get used to the idea that not everything needs to be fixed.

I completely disagree. There are a lot of easy solutions we ignored or never did.

Example 1: SEC authorized the banks to go from 12 to 1leverage ratio (borrowed money to actual money on hand) to 33 to 1 and higher. This is almost unheard of throughout banking history.

Example 2: In 1998 Brooksley Born, chairwoman of Commodity Futures Trading Commission, tried to save us with sound logic (Frontline has a great show on this) and was literally shouted down by Rubin, Greenspan, and others.

Example 3: Glass-Steagall act, instituted in 1933, was desinged to prevent Wall Street stupidity from seriously damaging the real economy. This bill was partially repealed in the 80′s and then completely done away with at the end of the 90′s.

In all 3 instances there was sound reasoning behind the right decision and religious fervor behind the wrong decisions. A better explanation would be facts vs. ideology/greed.

The information was right there, but no one cared as the decision makers were idealogues and/or connected to Wall Street.

With that being said it is getting a little ridiculous.

One of the previous posters made a good point that part of the reason the Democrats struggle to vote as one party is that a lot of them are conservative. I tend to agree, as the Blue Dog Democrats seem to represent what are supposed to be the “core” principles of the Republican party.

From my point of view Blue Dog Democrats are really Republicans who saw the rising tide of crazy in the Republican party and left.

Don’t put very much hope on term limits. California put term limits into effect 20 years ago, and it sure hasn’t been a rousing success. In fact, the legislature seems to work even more poorly now than it did then.

Cameron #67:

I find it very hard to believe that anyone believed that a Chicago politician would bring reform to Washington. Really, did anyone really believe that? I have to admit that I never lived in the Chicago area, but isn’t it the case that if you polled a reasonable sample of people in the U.S. asking “What word do you think of when I say “Chicago politics?” the top results would be far from flattering? (Not that other regions would get much better results, but I think that isn’t relevant to this point.)

*******

At the risk of being called a nihilist, a defeatist, or something similar, I admit to having no idea how to solve the collection of problems the U.S. faces. And I’m nearly certain that there isn’t anyone, anywhere on Earth who does, either. The so-called economics experts are divided into three or more mutually-contradictory camps, each with their Nobel prize-winning leaders. How is anyone supposed to make a rational decision about what policies to follow?

My feeling about it, and I admit it is only a feeling, is that we have a problem of scaling. That is, our population, our corporations, our governments, have grown well beyond the size that the ways we know how to manage them are valid. Sort of like trying to use Newtonian physics to guide your attempts to control objects moving at speeds near that of light.

But even if that is a correct assessment (and good luck getting a working majority to agree with it), it doesn’t tell us how to proceed from here. At least I can’t imagine how to scale those things back to a manageable size without causing catastrophes in doing so.

I have no conclusion. I don’t want to give up, but I don’t know what to do that has any rational basis.

The situation reminds me of the case of the elderly father of one of my acquaintances. The old man was in very poor health, being treated for I don’t know how many serious conditions, and he was rapidly going downhill. My acquaintance moved his father from the somewhat backwater town where he had been living to an area with top-rated hospitals. The new doctors decided that they should stop giving the guy any medications at all, give his body a while to detoxify (watching over him very carefully all the while), then assess his problems and begin treating those that seemed to need to be treated.

I don’t know how risky that approach was. My guess is that the risk was high. But his story turned out well. After a period of lots of problems, the new doctors found a set of treatments that returned the old man to rather good health, considering his history and age. He lived for many more years with little medical problems.

But, given what I said above about the dueling experts, I don’t believe we have a team of new doctors to whom we can turn over treatment of the U.S. There are still lots of mysteries about how the human body works and how to treat its problems, but our best doctors do know a lot of things that work, and what conditions they are good for. We don’t have the equivalent for the ails of the U.S.

So what should a rational person do?