The Pnictogen Wing

I had a very brief but vivid vision of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, once Leonardo da Vinci's patron until the Italian Renaissance got to him (i.e. his precarious alliances broke down and he fled posthaste), trying to pretend that he invented and did all da Vinci's work, like he was a CEO pretending to be a rocket scientist. >_>

I can't imagine those Italian merchant-princes were really any different, except that they had much better taste in books and paintings, and sending out for fancy stuff took months rather than days. Surely they, too, were all liars and braggarts. Tell me that Ludovico Sforza wouldn't pretend he was an inventor using some da Vinci sketches as "proof".

~Chara

If the Democrats screw this up, which unfortunately is something they're good at, there's going to be a lot of reasons why, but I suspect that a major reason is this: everyone kinda knows there's a bunch of senile old farts in politics, quietly being shepherded around by staff and still able to go through routine political motions, and nobody wants to talk about it openly.

Except, of course, for the GOP.

This is fresh off the presses and it looks like there isn't even a formal CWA press release yet, at least on their public channels. Nonetheless, this has been confirmed by the new union, OneBGS.

Statement as follows:

Workers at Bethesda Game Studios have joined the Communication Workers of America, forming the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio. The workers, consisting of 241 developers including artists, engineers, programmers and designers have either signed a union authorization card or indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal. Microsoft has recognized the union.

The Pnictogen Wing has two dragons. It's like I've got my own dragon counterpart, and my sibling Frisk has theirs. There's Kel the Purple, whom (as I've said in the past) we think is both a smol derg and a sentient electron, and is apparently quite young in spirit, which is giving us some difficulties. Just how do you teach a little kid about the Shoah, for example? No kidding, that's one of our worries. Anyway, Kel is "my" dragon, whereas Frisk's dragon Orpiment or Pim seems quite a bit more mature. She feels herself to be bigger, but also much vaguely defined, largely because Frisk has been stubbornly resistant in the past to the mystical and the fantastical. Lately she's been feeling more centered and more comfortable with being at the front of the system, and (like Frisk) Pim has a keenness for human politics.

Thus it was Pim, in conjunction with Frisk, who last night came up with an argument for why you should vote for Joe Biden even if he's really senile or ailing or whatever's supposed to be wrong with him. (I've noticed that the people calling for him to step down have gotten very imprecise as to why, and inclined to be citing popularity polls instead.) Pim says it doesn't matter! There's a logical argument for sticking with Joe Biden that's completely irrelevant to his political belief or indeed his competence.

It runs like this. It's a consequence of the "collective oligarchist" principle we talked about yesterday, the observation that all major offices of any power in the United States come with an expectation they'll have an unseen, unelected staff managing things along with the actual office-holder. For the President of the United States, I imagine that this population of assistants and aides must be in the thousands at least, both official and unofficial. (I think we've all just kind of accepted that Presidents are gonna have some obscure best friends, Bebe Rebozo or Harlan Crow types, who are secretly party to every decision.)

So if Joe Biden is non compos mentis, that private army of helpers is running things, not Biden. Pim argues that it'd be folly to disrupt this delicate situation. It takes time for such an internal organization to congeal, and now they're fully assembled and doing a reasonable job of running things with Biden as figurehead. What happens if Trump's elected? All that delicate and functional machinery of government gets ripped up, and a new gang moves in. Even if the GOP were known for competent governance, it would take them time to build up their own "court" around Donald Trump's presence in the Oval Office. In practice that wouldn't matter. The Democrats are good at dull competence, and the GOP...isn't, and doesn't want to be.

I'm convinced, and I hope you are! If we're really facing a battle between competing senile guys, continuity makes more sense. The country needs some breathing space for dealing with this unprecedented situation. Switching to another senile guy isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure!

~Chara