west point

i feel really good about politics right now. my instincts are good, and i need to learn to trust them. i pick up on things and i am generally correct about implications and intentions. student politics stresses me out more than real politics because i can't trust that reactions will be professional. there's no even playing field. when people lose by the rules, they jump to anonymous smear campaigns. they make things up. they lie. the frustration is that the people who believe in smears at this level are the ones working in real politics. things get ugly elsewhere, sure, but there's less stupidity.

what confuses me are the tactics that are clearly built for a daily or 24-hr media cycle. anonymous smears are only useful if they get into the media or other level of public consciousness before being discredited and spun. SFU works on a 7-day media cycle. within a day of launching an anonymous smear campaign, it will be answered. on the other hand, it's a classic identifying tactic, and might as well have had a signature across the bottom for all that it's a classic move. maybe it's just a matter of keeping the opposition off base. it rattled me, just because i hate to have to be at that level. i know the rules and i work within them well. i know how to win.

in effect, we're caught in a massive and national industrial sabotage campaign. that's all. today made that very clear: this is dirty fucking pool, and it has little if anything to do with SFU at all. the question is whether people realise that. i wonder if people believe that they are working on behalf of students, when in fact they are working on behalf of a corrupt business entity.

i've monitored myself well, in terms of committment and time. i asked good questions today about the ottoman empire's bureacratic tendencies! i understand bureaucracy. my curiosity about the debate over whether newfoundland was the victim of a british/canadian conspiracy in 1949: why would canada go to such trouble for newfoundland? they seem to have caused us more worry than not. newfoundland complicates things.

john kerry would spend all day on his phone as the days wound down in 2004. he'd come to a decision and then call up someone else for a second opinion. then a third. this is a variation on analysis paralysis. if john kerry had taken 50,000 more votes in ohio, we'd have to rewrite history. kerry's cell phone addiction would be hailed as brilliant. bush's intractable nature would be derided as idiotic, rather than stolid. campaign history is a difficult beast.