Extinction Burst: A short-term increase in the frequency and intensity of a response during the extinction process, due to a lack of reinforcement.
I was a little worried about this place after the results of the mid-term elections, but only a little. A month of purist I-told-you-so’s, followed by a month of pragmatist oh-no-you-di-in’t’s. Then a wagonload of pie diaries like this one.
So here we are. Two dysfunctional, shell-shocked factions looking to each other for comfort, each unable to give anything but rage. Sad, but predictable.
Thank the stars we've reached the extinction burst...a flurry of head-banging, chair-throwing, mama-insulting tantrum diaries followed by the exhausted realization by both sides that it doesn’t matter because neither side is going to budge anyway.
It's not us. It's them - the people who voted against their own interests because they're too lazy to turn off Fox News and walk around their neighborhoods.
For the umpteenth time: We have winner-take-all elections. The two-party system is a natural and unavoidable outcome of winner-take-all elections.
Other systems might give a voice to smaller parties and a broader representation of views in their legislative bodies, but eventually those factions have to compromise and coalesce around a single course of action if they want to get anything passed. In those systems, the compromise happens during the law-making phase.
In our system the compromises happen pre-election, when we have to coalesce around a candidate. One thing that is guaranteed under our system is that almost nobody who votes for a viable candidate finds him or her to be the ideal. I have never voted for an ideal candidate for anything, though Barry Commoner for president in 1980 was pretty close.
You might ask: Who’s Barry Commoner?
Exactly.
President Obama, on a scale of 1 to 10, is about a 4.5 for me, and for that I am ecstatic. I’m so accustomed to zeroes and ones that a 4.5 seems dreamlike.
To my fellow pragmatists: Let’s shut the hell up, me included. We aren’t going to convince people that half a loaf is better than nothing if the missing half is the half they needed. Lets keep grinding away trying to get that other half, even if nobody gives us points just for trying.
To the purists: Please refrain from trying to convince us that President Obama is the devil. We’ve seen the devil, and she’s on cable TV doing a weekly travelogue about Alaska. I like my 4.5; I already agree that our guy is wrong 55% of the time. You aren’t getting more from me.
There. All settled.