A friend of mine was contracted by an anarchist bookstore to make some posters (yes, I have interesting friends and I’m proud of it). He came up with lots of great stuff but my favourite mostly just said “somewhere along the line we forgot that we made all of this stuff up.”

I think he’s right, and that’s why horse-race political coverage is depressing to me:

Painting the Suburbs Blue, Ed Dionne Jr., Washington Post

If you buy into the pan-universal cue break theory, then fine, all of existence is an ordered series of inevitable predeterminate cause-and-effect events, and all we have is the utterly convincing illusion that we have meaningful choice over ourselves and influence on the world around us. I don’t know many folk who take that perspective, but I sure seem to know some who think that politics and business are inevitable end-of-history monoliths that just are that way, and having opinions about how they should or could be is tragic naivety. But here’s the thing: we make all this stuff up. Not individually, and not always intentionally, so we can’t just decide how the world should be and it will become that. But we do have influence, we can participate in the ebb-and-flow that collectively emerges our social scenarios. Democrats aren’t winning in the former red states because of a wobbly orbit in the universe which can be observed and extrapolated out to predict the rest of the future, they are winning there because they are somehow convincing people to vote for them in elections. If the republicans change their behaviour they can swing that around. Income disparity isn’t growing because free markets are the nature of the world and that’s what happens in free markets, it’s growing because our choices have created a particular form of free-market-based society where disparity can grow. It’s also our choices which have prevented it from growing more. Collectively at least, this stuff is on us. Some people take that as precocious self-importance, but it doesn’t make it less true.