NYT: We Need a Second Party

[wial]

9. Hear hear

Normally I avoid Tom Friedman articles because the bad writing hurts my brain. (I do enough of that on my own as those who read on will see).

"There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date." is just nonsense in the terms of Scrabble, and even in the way he set up his own metaphor. Scrabble never goes out of date, nor do the spelling rules of the English language. What he's implying is wrong too -- that the player was creating good words previously. The thing is, as azureblue says, conservatism is based greed, anger and ignorance, the afflictive emotions that cause all our suffering. It is therefore by its nature internally inconsistent. You can't spell words with it because it's only good for incoherent whooping and grunting. If I want that kind of communication I'll stick to Whitman and Ginsberg, (and maybe Howard Dean), who reclaim yawping and howling at a higher level. I won't try to validate a pompose Conradian fallacy of conservative safety to tame the multitude. That's just government by hollow men for hollow men.

No, as others have said, we need a second party to the left of the dems. That's what happened in New Zealand. The right collapsed under the weight of its inherent stupidity, and elections became contests between the Greens and the center left. We can still hope it will happen here too as the environment gets worse and educational standards improve.