(ultralude)

Sounds like a punk band. “Dude, I saw the UltraLudes Friday, they rocked”.

I want to post more of the “Lessons”, but it’ll be a couple of days. I need to earn some wages, and also am going to blast out some more emails promoting this thing, which involves the data mining I’ve been putting off so long… ugh. And then there’s the PAC being created. Plenty to do.

As I mentioned in email to more than one commentator, really, most of you should be blogging like this. I think it’s important we raise the bar. That said, I’m going to touch on some of the issues raised in the comments, rather than post many replies and start a virtual forum in the comments section (something this software isn’t ideally suited for, especially as the comments don’t seem to thread).

I’m going to talk a lot more about our success, failure, the GOP “fit” or lack thereof, “change” a la Obama vs our much less successful r[evol]ution, so I’m going to leave those comments alone for now. One of the emails I got was virtually an encapsulation of Lesson #3 (or was it #4…)!?! IS THERE A LEAK??? :’) I think it just goes to show that these ideas aren’t particularly “mine”… there is a truth in here, and a lot of us are sniffing around the edges of it.

So to some of the comments… as to a Ron Paul “intentional community”… I don’t know. Those things seem to invite extremely violent federal intervention, don’t they? Plus, isn’t the Free State Project up and running?

Generally, you’ll find the gist of my message to be that dialoging with the center and building bridges out across the political spectrum is something I have more interest in than turtling up and trying to keep Evil At Bay. I support people’s right to do that. But I feel a sense of (uh oh) duty, to try and connect the dots in the American political landscape. Part of what I was trying to convey in the Kinky Carole piece is just that: that we aren’t really so far out. WE ARE THE MAJORITY. It’s just that the rest of the “majority” doesn’t realize it… yet. :’)

Also (and this has been coming up a lot lately), there is this meme that Disaster is Imminent, that We Don’t Have Time. All I can say is, who knows? As I said to someone recenty, maybe it is, in fact, bottom of the 9th w/ 2 out and we’re down by 11 runs. I just gotta keep my head in the game and hit the damned ball. And besides, history moves so much slower when you’re living it in real time. I’ve been looking for the sky to fall since around 1980 and it hasn’t yet.

I have reason to hope, as my friend BZ does. I think there is a deep populist current in this country, one with a distinctly libertarian (as opposed to “progressive”) bent. The so called “remnant”. I’ll be talking more about this. “Right” and “Left”… these ideological boxes are profoundly broken, in fact they’re leaking so badly that we have lifelong Dems voting for McCain and GOPsters voting for Obama.

As to the comment about the dumbing down of America, our hopeless educational system and the like… a favorite subject of mine btw… “In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hands” (who can source that quote…? NO GOOGLING… :’D )… heh, I’ll quote Mencken: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people”. Which is to say that there’s been a sort of selfrighteous cloddishness built into the “American Psyche” since, probably, the 18th c. (Tocqueville noticed it). But the good news is: it doesn’t take a majority. It takes a critical mass. And I believe that we can, in fact, devise ways to break the “manipulative mechanisms” and win over that 100th monkey.

Regardless, it’s worth taking our swing, eh?

ps YALOTPC = “Y”et “A”nother “L”esson “O”f “T”he “P”aul “C”ampaign