Fiscal Cliff: A Historical Parallel?

The US "Fiscal Cliff" (specifically budget sequestration process) -->

People propose things that they think no one wants to make sure something happens (the budget passes) -->

Sounds a lot like The Tariff of Abominations, that famously idiotic move by Southern politician Calhoun in 1828 whereby a Tariff that nearly everyone hated was passed anyway:

"In an elaborate scheme to prevent passage of still higher tariffs, while at the same time appealing to Andrew Jackson’s supporters in the North, John C. Calhoun and other southerners joined them in crafting a tariff bill that would also weigh heavily on materials imported by the New England states. It was believed that President John Quincy Adams’s supporters in New England, the National Republicans, or as they would later be called, Whigs, would uniformly oppose the bill for this reason and that the southern legislators could then withdraw their support, killing the legislation while blaming it on New England . . .

"A substantial minority of New England Congressmen (41%) saw what they believed to be long-term national benefits of an increased tariff, and voted for it; they believed the tariff would strengthen the manufacturing industry nationally.

"The Democratic Party had miscalculated: despite the insertion of import duties by Democrats calculated to be unpalatable to New England industries, most specifically on raw wool imports, essential to the wool textile industry, the New Englanders failed to sink the legislation, and their plan backfired."

A lot of differences, though--an important one being that the negative and unnecessary effects of Congress failing to come to a budget probably won't be backed off from in another four years.

Where has all the community gone?

There's really very little community in modern society, at least in the culturally accepted places. (I can't speak to everyone's experiences; I don't claim to. What I say here is probably especially true for young adults, if it is for anyone.) Families fall apart in the wake of divorce as home life degrades; legitimate social discourse takes place primarily in conflationist, mobocracy blocs; few know or interact with their neighbors, and outside of that, anyone not known from previous, involuntarily established relationships (school, family, work, etc.), most people instinctively avoid anyway. "Public" spaces, where we interact with such strangers, are uncomfortable and alienating and not really public in the sense of community, or true socialism, or honestly feeling like the space is partly one's own.
As it is with public space, so it is with res publica in general--in the sense of one's responsibility, or of one's stake, or of any sort of relationship that an individual can have with a community of which he is a constituent part--true community is virtually nonexistent. The conceptual violence necessary to think of our current, unnatural socio-political structure as a form of community--something our politicians ask us to do all the time--is rather like suddenly discovering the rotting corpse of a close friend, whom one had until just now believed still alive. That's the day-to-day relationship we as individuals have with the concept of community; we easily allow ourselves to be convinced that community is alive and well. And yet it is a corpse; and its pale, decaying flesh has been stretched impossibly taut over the entire face of "our" nation-state. . . .

This is why it feels like doing something you're not supposed to when you get together with close friends in real community. It feels like conspiring, like intellectual mirroring, like holing up against the forces of chaos and time and an unjust world. Whenever you feel at all close to another person, it must constantly, at least subconsciously, remind you of how alone you are used to feeling.

Hypothetical Excerpt from the Inner Dialogue of the Main Character of a True Story

 . . . Though he thought his problem was overthinking, it was not. It was his reaction to a difficult situation that defined his greatest error. It was the virtue of courage that he lacked. He was a coward. Thus came the torrents of superfluous and death-by-a-thousand-cuts thoughts and considerations and doubts. When one is afraid of the result of making a decision, one rationalizes the tremulation and sputtering that results from any particular juncture. And so he was more "thoughtful" than he should be. It was plain as day. He only wished he could escape this fateful dynamic. He wished ... what? That he was not a coward? If only it were that easy. What makes a coward? Surely it is a process. Men are not born cravens. They are made. He wished he understood himself better.

A Conceit: Every Mile but the Last

Today I changed my blog's name to "Every Mile but the Last" in reference to a particular conceit, based on what's called the "last mile" in the telecommunications industry. In this usage, if the last mile of wiring or means of relay or whatever is down en route to customers' neighborhoods or houses, the whole telecommunication system fails.

Another very similar problem is that of how we get software onto machines. Computers only understand binary. The central task of programming languages is thus to bring commands from a human-manipulable language like Java to the level that specific computers, many with different architectures or operating systems, can understand. Here we have another "last mile", which is the translation of commands into the basic code that a specific computer understands. The last mile in both cases effectively symbolizes the importance of establishing infrastructure.

If you learn about the development of telephone communication as a viable service, you learn that the first problem The Bell Telephone company had to solve in trying to commercialize their stunning new product in the 1880s or so was how to provide reliable telephone wiring on a truly mass scale, and do so cheaply. Their problem was that they had to make cities and rural communities alike connected on a scale that they never had been before. This is the problem of infrastructure in telecommunications. For software, the original problem of infrastructure was just as difficult. Modern-day software developers benefit massively from the existence of the C programming language. Most software today is written in extremely "high-level" language--basically, those that do a lot of your work for you--which are in turn inevitably based on C. But scarcely does anyone use Assembly Language, or, heaven forbid, an even lower level language. This is because we've already built systems of meaning that do a lot of our work for us.

Most generally, specific things, places, people are different from each other. The virtue of "looking closely", as I once referred to it, or "narrowness", as the Bayesians over at lesswrong.com term it, takes advantage of just this fact. And it is only through looking closely at specific situations and experiences that we can achieve any relationship at all with capital 'T' Truth. But the purpose of creating an infrastructure for large-scale communication or for manipulating machines is in essence to streamline each process, taking advantage of the inherent structure of the information that needs to be disseminated, so as to do it most efficiently.

Finally the conceit. In naming my blog "every mile BUT the last", I'm effectively saying that I can't deliver meaning straight into your cortex. I can only bring you most of the way--present you with evidence, make a connection or two. At that point, the rest is up to you, and whether or not you have established through your habits of thought the proper infrastructure to receive what I have to say.

A Little Thingy Called "reality"

Compare: 

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

"Since our predictions don't always come true, we need different words to describe the thingy that generates our predictions and the thingy that generates our experimental results. The first thingy is called 'belief', the second thingy 'reality'."

(taken wholesale from the blogs/wikis at LessWrong.com: http://goo.gl/mYKSJ)

Losing Track of Reality: Imperialism and Push vs Pull

Compare:

"The aide [Karl Rove] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' " (from http://goo.gl/OIQT3) (This interview took place in 2002.)

and

    "... From these changes comes the need and the opportunity for the large organization. It alone can deploy the requisite capital; it alone can mobilize the requisite skills .... The large commitment of capital and organization well in advance of result requires that there be foresight and also that all feasible steps be taken to insure that what is foreseen will transpire.
    Planning exists because the [market] process has ceased to be reliable. Technology, with its companion commitment of time and capital, means that the needs of the consumer must be anticipated--by months or years.... [I]n addition to deciding what the consumer will want and will pay, the firm must make every feasible step to see that what the consumer will want and will pay, the firm must make every feasible step to see that what it decides to produce is wanted by the consumer at a remunerative price.... It must exercise control over what is sold.... It must replace the market with planning.
    ... The need to control consumer behavior is a requirement of planning. Planning in turn, is made necessary by extensive use of advanced technology and capital and by the relative scale and complexity of organization. As a further consequence, goods that are related only to elementary physical sensation--that merely prevent hunger, protect against cold, provide shelter, suppress pain--have come to comprise a small and diminishing part of all production. Most goods serve needs are discovered to the individual not by the palpable discomfort that accompanies deprivation, but by some psychic response to their possession...."
 - John Kenneth Galbraith, "The New Industrial State" (This was written in 1967. See also: push vs pull economies, explained well here: http://goo.gl/ddMMK)