Blog

Last week, the unthinkable happened.

Well, I shouldn't describe it like that. Thousands of people thought about it enough to make it happen, millions of people supported it, and many observers had been warning about it for weeks. Clearly it was on people's minds. But that doesn't make it any less incredible.

The President of the United States instigated an armed coup and assault on Congress, specifically and explicitly to disrupt an otherwise boring procedural footnote in the process of replacing him as President. The Capitol building was invaded and sacked for the first time since 1814.

In all of the various debates around the systematic assault on the US Postal Service (USPS) of late by the Trump administration, one statement crops up now and again. It takes various forms, but boils down to something like this:

The post office is great and all, but shouldn't it be self-sustaining? Things that aren't self-sustaining in the free market don't last, so if something can't be self-sustaining then it probably should get replaced by something that is (like a private company).

There's a whole lot to unpack here, so I will try to be brief, but knowing me, I will fail miserably.

(I originally wrote this with the hopes of getting it published in a more politically-targeted publication, but none of them got back to me. I guess if it's not COVID-related they're not interested. So I'm posting it here instead. Please share far and wide.)

I would like to tell you a story. It is a story about politics. About how politics works, and how it doesn't work. It's a case study in how, across the country, the very nature of our political system undermines democracy and keeps those in power, in power. But it's a story that also reveals the steps that can be taken to help fix it.

It's also, for me, a very personal story.

Earlier today, I sent the following letter (or slight variations thereof) to my elected legislators:

• US Senator Dick Durbin
• US Senator Tammy Duckworth
• Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky
• State Senator Laura Fine
• State Representative Robyn Gabel

So far, my congressional delegation has all made public statements questioning or condemning the police violence across the country, but I don't believe anyone in government has yet gone far enough.

I am posting the Senator version here as well to make it available to anyone who wishes to use it as a template for their own letters to their elected representatives.

I try to remain friends, or at least friendly, with people who disagree with me on issues. It's important to do so, even if that means avoiding certain topics.

Unfortunately, recent events have now made that impossible. To my conservative friends (not Republican friends, conservative friends), I must offer my sympathy. Whether or not I can still offer my friendship is up to you.

I've been working with Fair Vote IL lately, which is working to advocate for Ranked Choice Voting in Illinois. For now we're looking toward the Presidential Primaries but the long-term goal is to use RCV for all elections. If you're not familiar with Ranked Choice Voting, the Australien Government has an excellent explainer:

The Internet has been angry lately about Things in Tech, as the Internet usually is. And inevitably there have been the people saying "can't we just focus on code without the politics?" Which, while an understandable desire (and one I agree with), is simply impractical. What's especially telling, though, are the people who specifically name-drop FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) as something that is a-political and should be kept that way.

That... demonstrates a complete and total lack of awareness of Free Software itself. I assume in most cases that it's honest ignorance, so I will try to briefly explain why that is not the case. (Feel free to point people to this article in the future the next time they start down that line of thinking; just be nice about it.)

In the latest "wait, what?" move from the current American President, apparently the US is going to impose a tariff on all goods from Mexico, its second-largest trading partner, until Mexico "does something" about the illegal immigration problem along the US-Mexico border.

Let's leave aside for the moment that it's almost certainly just a distraction from something else.

Let's leave aside for the moment that, just like the Chinese tariffs, it's almost certainly going to do as much if not more harm to US companies than to Mexico, especially as many companies were in the process of moving manufacturing from China to Mexico.

Let's leave aside for the moment that illegal immigration has been declining for years, since long before Trump was in office.

Let's leave aside for the moment that illegal immigrants make up only about 3% of the total US population.

Let's leave aside for the moment the racist attitudes and beliefs behind much (although not all, I would argue) of the anti-immigration movement, and behind the entire Trump foreign and immigration policy positions.

Leaving all of that aside... it's still incredibly stupid. Assuming for a moment that your goal is reducing immigration into the US, for whatever reason, basically everything the Trump administration and its supporters propose to do is wrong and counter-productive toward that goal.

The core problem is supply-side economics.

If you haven't been living under a rock, by now you're well-aware of the school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida last week. For the most part it has played out much as previous mass shootings have. There's a very clear script that the USA follows: