UPDATE: Cult of Mac Blog HAS Moved
The Cult of Mac blog is moving to a new address. The blog can now be found at www.cultofmac.com. And we’re serious this time. We’re still part of the Wired family, just decamped to our own domain to make some mischief. We even have several posts from this week, if you’ve been wondering where we’ve been…
Here is the new RSS feed.
we’ll see you over there.
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Senate Update: Two Venal Morons Hang On to Slim Leads [Campaigns]
in the senate, the democrats picked up five seats. but hey, guess what? minnesota senator norm coleman barely held on to his hinie. with all the precincts reporting, coleman’s won by 571 votes. which means recount early! poor comedian al franken should’ve won this, but a third party seeker took more of his votes than coleman’s (instant runoff voting, anyone? please?), and also he didn’t run a selfsame beneficent campaign, and also minnesotans, like many americans, are in love with the suspicion of a divided government as some sort of merit thing, because we all remember how well that worked in 1994, when the government shut down, as a stunt. and hey, let’s check in on alaska, the retarded child state america forgot it adopted until this year, when it barely crashed the self-governing car into a tree.
Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, who is a convicted felon, won his reelection campaign! Stevens, convicted just last week of seven counts of corruption, has a 4,000 vote lead over his opponent, some boring non-corrupt Democrat. There are still 50,0000 absentee ballots left to count, so you know, this could still go either way. But honestly, Stevens is probably a lock. Good work, Alaska.
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sanctify
There can rarely have been a better allegory for the melancholic misery of American electoral politics than California’s Proposition Two:
the proposition would combine a chapter to division 20 of the california health and sanctuary code to prohibit the confinement of certain farmstead animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around easily, lie down, stand up, and fully elongate their limbs. i burned-out a bit of time weeping over this proposition, though the source of my surrender concerns empathy for animals buy Lioresal single in some fractional degree.
I am just a bit leery of the category of empathy for animals, not because I think it’s misbegotten but because the imagination that animals have “thoughts” or “feelings” which are analogous to those of humans leads to all kinds of mistakes; every time someone tells me why it’s okay to train animals to do stuff, or to sit on top of horses, they make some kind of appeal to the animal’s inner nature, and what it wants and what its idea of a good life is, that isn’t finally persuasive. That said, if you are determined to vote, vote yes on 2 (and no on 8).
Then weep, if you have any empathy at all. What you will have just voted for is this: that animals, which have no real protection from the buy Zanaflex power of humans, should be granted some nominal degree of “freedom” and “dignity” which involves, in short, a few inches of mobility in the relatively brief period before they and/or their offspring are destroyed and consumed by profit. No debate on the latter point. What their lives are for, we shall not consider, for that has been long ago decided. Salve your conscience thusly: that the strong should by all means continue to prey on the weak, but that certain relatively minuscule palliatives should be proffered during the productive process. Palliatives which are surely real, and which just as surely sanctify the larger process, and the predation of the owners upon the caged and the crated.
And then vote for a president. For better cages and crates. Call this “progressive,” even call it “left.” Sanctify, sanctify.
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A More Perfect Union
It’s hard for me to hold back tears right now. Philosophically, I am a conservative and a Republican, so some level it is sad to see the GOP lose so dramatically.
But I am also an African American. My father grew up in the Jim Crow South, and I’ve faced my share of racism and discrimination. Tonight, as my partner Daniel and I heard now President-elect Obama speak, I started to shed tears and that says a lot, since I don’t cry that often.
I’m crying because something unimagninable happened tonight. Something I had never dream would happen anytime in the near future. A man that has skin like mine, was elected the President of a country that only a generation ago gave its former slaves full civil rights.
Maybe the most telling thing tonight as I watched the returns come in was to see when Iowa was called for Obama. The news person circled the statistic that revealed the percentage of African Americans living in the state that started Obama down this road: 2 percent. A state with 2 percent of African Americans was able to vote decisively for an African American. We may still have a long way to go, but we have really come a mighty long way.
In the coming weeks and months, the task of governing will begin. President-elect Obama will face a nation with a lot of troubles and the GOP has to begin the hard task of rebuilding again.
But for tonight, I will celebrate and wish Obama the best. I will also thank God to live in a country where a skinny kid with a funny name can become President.
And I will probably shed a few more tears.
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