Parking Lot Dinners

COVID-19 has been making us rethink how we gather together and how we use our public spaces. I've already noticed how restaurants have moved onto patios, people eat in their cars in parking lots, and parks are getting new appreciation. Meanwhile, our community spaces have been shrinking, being gated off, more policed...we've become an anti-social society. Then there is the problem that religious buildings have monopolized community spaces with zoning and tax privilege. It is not an acceptable trade that if we want community or meeting spaces...we must expose our children to indoctrination and delusion. THIS is a great time to plan/create new community spaces/parks, killing two birds with one stone; we can create public, outdoor spaces that allow us to distance while being together...and in non-pandemic times, create community spaces where we can have discussions without having social media algorithms shoving outrage-inducing messages in our faces. We'll have places we can meet real people, no bots, and have real conversations, and learn to socialize in healthy and productive ways; all that on neutral, public territory.

Religion, The Destroyer Of Minds

In every segment of history where there is an instance of mass delusion and all the crazies come out...the medium is religion. The Dark Ages, The Crusades, The Witch Burnings, Islamic Terrorism...and now QAnon and all the nutcases claiming "the radical left are Satan worshiper, pedophiles" and all that nonsense. Every time I'm inclined to think maybe religion MIGHT have some good points...its bad points show themselves to be OVERWHELMINGLY harmful and eclipse any good that could possibly come out of religion in our modern world.

To be clear though, I'm not just picking religion because it's old and the stories are crazy (which they are)...but I want to highlight the one piece of religion that TRULY makes it horrible...and that is the fact that it teaches people "what to think" and not "how to think" or in other words it teaches people to learn "from authority." The Bible doesn't say "stealing is not ideal because it's unsustainable in the long run, it hurts the person you are stealing from, it robs society of trust, and it isn't an efficient way to distribute resources"...no, what religion says is "THOU SHALL NOT STEAL." It teaches people that facts and ways to behave come from sources of authority (a bible, a priest, a FOX anchorman, an orange-haired maniac in the Presidency, etc), and not from actually using your brain, weighing evidence, aligning oneself to reality, and having an informed and reasoned stance on issues.

We MUST get over religion. I'm sorry...rational people have been trying to peel off the band-aid slowly and painlessly for centuries...but it's time people. We can't keep pretending it's benign. I'm not authoritarian, so obviously I'm not suggesting we ban anything, but we have to be CLEAR that it is: 1) Untrue, 2) Teaches people unhealthy practices, 3) Has no place in decision-making, formal or informal.

Critical Mass Of Congress

Voting for the best politicians on your ballot is necessary but not sufficient. We need two-thirds of the House and Senate so we can amend the Constitution. No matter how great a single candidate, no real change can be made if they are the lone voice; it doesn't even matter if they become President. We need to take the entire process back for the people, and when we do we gotta exorcise all the corrupt laws and policies. 

Just to name a handful: abolish Electoral College, create publicly funded elections, abolish gerrymandering, implement ranked-choice voting, abolish all non-public money in politics, create harsh penalties for institutional economic crime, re-separate powers and strengthen checks and balances, clarify that corporations are not people and money is not speech, create strict penalties for environmental destruction, clarify the limitations of powers we've learned from recent Presidential/Congressional/Judicial actions, etc.

The Big Assumption About Voter Turnout

There is a big assumption that if we can get people to vote, it will ALSO force them to think about the issues and candidates in a critical way; this election has proven that completely false. We had a record-breaking number of voters, 24/7 media sensationalist coverage of this President (albeit Mainstream Media is complete crap), and people by the tens of millions still made horrible, nonsensical choices. What this means is we need to focus on building CRITICAL THINKING and AWARENESS. If you can't tell if Trump is a savior, or if corona virus is a real threat, etc. you definitely don't have the observation and/or decision-making skills to vote properly. I'm not saying you have to know everything or be perfect...but you need the basic observation skills to ATTEMPT to know what is real, and to be able to reason the best educated guess you can...and we are far from even that. We have to get a grip on combating ignorance and delusion in our public, and teach them the skills they need to make good choices. I don't know if this is something that needs to happen in schools, or in media, or in community spaces, but it NEEDS to happen.

Takeaways From This Election

1) People don't vote based on a comprehensive analysis of Policy, as they should, but on nonsense tribal/religious/culture-war/ego trash reasons.
2) It's always been lore that if more people vote, democrats win...but not always true, this country is full of conservatives (at least on a state by state, potentially gerrymandered, basis).
3) Again, the Electoral College is an abomination.
4) Our voting systems are garbage.