Grumpy Old Fen

[kevin_standlee]

bovil has written about issue 16 of John Purcell's In A Prior Lifetime #16. In it, Ted White has an article about the fan Hugo Awards and complains generally about Worldcons. I've sent a LOC responding to this article, although I did not include my usual observation about people who gripe about the Hugo Awards, which is that IMO most people dissatisfied with the Hugos do so because the Awards don't reflect their personal preferences for who should be winning them.

Edit, 23 Oct 22:30: Added subject line omitted when originally composed.

Comments

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Do you distinguish this from those who have concluded that the election machinery is so irretreviably corrupted (with Diebold vote-generating machines in place, a packed SCOTUS to "legalize" the products they will spit forth, and the news media self-gelded) that voting is in fact a futile gesture, and that the American Experiment of 1776 has finally jumped the shark?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do. Being worried about the integrity of the election mechanisms is one thing. Being convinced that the mechanism must be broken because your preferred candidate doesn't win is completely different. What bothers me is that there are people on all sides of political discussion who are so utterly convinced of the rightness of their cause that they assume that of course everyone (or at least, "everyone who matters") agrees with them, so if elections turn out differently, it means the election mechanism must be corrupted.

However, I will take issue with part of what you say...

...a packed SCOTUS to "legalize" the products they will spit forth...

From the Right's point of view, the SCOTUS was "packed" with people engaged in "judicial activism" for many years. What one side is convinced is "packing" is the "upholding the law" from the other side's point of view.

I haven't given up on America yet. I also don't think the voting process is quite as corrupt as many people claim, although I admit that I don't have any evidence to support my assertion other than anecdotal. (My source: One of my aunts was responsible for elections in a rural California county for many years.) And I sometimes wonder if such subversion of the voting process as does happen might not be roughly cancelling each other out, although that's a very cynical sort of thought for someone who wants to be idealistic.

(The best I can do in my little corner of the world is to make sure that the elections I've supervised are clean. I hope I've succeeded there.)

I'm sure that a fairly significant number of Americans were convinced that this country had "jumped the shark" for years and years by the dominance of one party's rule. The USA has always had a strong conservative streak. Note that I'm horrified by the current erosion or potential erasure of our civil rights, and am not much of a fan of anything else the current administration has done, so I'm not defending that.

Personally, I tend toward libertarianism, except that I can't stand most of the upper-case-Libertarians I've encountered in fandom -- their version of Libertariansm, IMO, if actually tried, would collapse into some form of feudalism in time.

If anything, the elections that led to the current administration show that we could really use some form of Instant Runoff Voting, so people would feel more comfortable voting for someone other than one of the two major party candidates. If IRV were in place, I think Al Gore would have been elected president over Bush, albeit by a slim margin, as the Buchannan votes would presumably shifted to Bush and the Nader votes to Gore. (Both Buchannan and Nader would have received a lot more votes initially, too, since the far right and far left would have been less worried about "throwing their votes away.") Whether Gore would still be in office today is much harder to predict.