Soop

With any luck, the County executive and the right wing tyrant faction will be off Supervisor Holloway's case for awhile. At least the ethics board comes away with a little bit of respect intact.

Hopefully, Supervisor Holloway will be able to continue his political career and provide benefit to the thousands of urban residents he represents. We all know that politicians too long in office tend to corrupt, but maybe a good stiff battle every now and again keeps an individual honest - though in this case there was a bias that suggested correction where it was never really due. However, what goes around comes around, so perhaps its time to take a hard look at our political system and the various factions with their diverse political mechanics working to alter and destabilize our republican form of government, with its structural balances and checks on power. Especially those factions masquerading as arbitrary checks on government corruption.

In a republic, technically, there is no such thing as a minority. Class power balanced one against another keeps only reason in common. A minority opinion can be nothing other than the absence of reason. However, if we throw in probability and weighted issues, there still remains an underlying mechanism. In the real world there is no such thing as random or chance, all there is is our own inability to consider all the significant factors that influence a result. What this suggests is that where reason fails, there still remains the weighting of success against the weighting of failure. The question that should be asked more often is: if a program fails, can we afford to recover and return to the previous state of affairs?

In many situations we cannot return without a very high cost, which may not be less that the suffering due to failure. This is a fundamental quality of many systems and is the basis of 'catastrophy theory'. The best system we can, as human beings, devise, is one where all interests are present and empowered. Where a substantial part of the system is under represented or worse, ignored, the probability of failure increases dramatically, which in all likelihood will cost more in the end, than a more modest success that incorporates all the factors will cost overall.

To persecute or attempt to expunge those individuals who represent the city is, perhaps, the most egregious mistake County government and the suburban factions could make. In any city, there is a much higher population density, which leads to a high percentage of 'free riders', which are individuals who take advantage of civil society. This is simply a population based phenomenon, which gives individuals the feeling of security in anonymity. Since this is more prevalent in the city, there is a cultural thread that adapts to it. Individuals who are exposed to this on a daily basis tend to become desensitized toward it and just accept it as matter of fact. The result is that it is much less often corrected even when it is a simple mistake, so individuals tend to be less careful by habit than they otherwise could be. Let it be clear, that this is not a character flaw, but a social adaptation to an urban lifestyle. It can be corrected, as any habit can, but it takes a conscious effort, and what happens to the individual's inclusive fitness for urban life as a consequence?

Bigotry cannot be tolerated anywhere in the United States, so barring that, there is no reason why Urban issues need to be falsely represented, and no reason for surburban factions to persecute urban representatives in government. If there is a problem with an individual in office in the eyes of those whom they represent, the issue
should be addressed by them alone, at least barring an actual crime. For pundits hailing from rural outposts to cast aspersions upon urban representation is pure ignorance - in a deep sense.

For my part I certainly hope that Supervisor Holloway stays in office for a good while longer and that the faction hammer doesn't simply shift to pounding on some other urban representative. If an issue is soundly reasoned, there should be no serious opposition. Opposition occurs, in a republican form of government anyway, when sound principles are not adhered to and arbitrary, unpredictable and unjust rhetoric is propounded instead. In which case it is the responsibility of reasonable individuals to oppose such tyranny. Individuals who stand up to this sort of injustice are the best people to have in office. Those who promote such cockamamie schemes as to deprive the poor to pay for programs that help them should be released from public service.

Peace.