Cav's Place

That the winter solstice saddens me because I don’t want days to get longer isn’t anything I haven’t said before, for example in the similar post I wrote in 2009, which references what I had written a year before as well. It’s also a part of a longer post I wrote back in 2007, which would also explain more about where this is coming from and why does this time of year make me feel like this, so I see no point in repeating any of that. At least we seem to have some snow again, which is a good thing, but that’s about it.

Otherwise, writing’s going poorly, but that’s no news. What may be news, however, is that I actually seem to be on my way to reaching the goal I had set for myself regarding submissions on MobyGames this year, even though I was only at some 75% of it some two weeks ago. Now I’m just where I wanted to be at this moment, opening up the option of slowing down to a more reasonable pace if I find myself needing to, but also that of securing a decent buffer if I’m able to maintain the current pace. Obviously, I’ll try to go for the latter, because a buffer will be needed if I’m to have so many of them actually approved directly, in part because doing so many means I’m sure I made at least a few mistakes and in part because sites change things around or vanish completely at times, so I always have a few that are rejected through no fault of my own, because it can’t readily be verified that they were true at the time of submission anymore. The oldest ranks I have waiting in queue have been there since the end of August, after all, so a lot may happen by the time somebody’ll get around to what I’ve been adding this month.

What’s been making everything even harder than usual is that some neighbors just moved in recently and started modifying their apartment, so there’s a huge amount of noise just about every day, starting in the morning. That means that for the past couple of weeks, or perhaps even more than that, I keep waking up with my heart racing, after usually something between three and five hours of sleep. Granted, at least they start later than others, only a few times around 9 AM, usually at 10 AM or later, when during the warmer months it’s not exactly unusual to have somebody start drilling and hammering at or even before 8 AM, but the fact that they’re right below me and use such powerful tools makes it an awful problem, since everything carries so well and sometimes I’m pulled right out of a dream and think everything’s collapsing around me for a moment.

That’d be about it I guess. I’ll try to take some comfort in the darkness and the snowfall while I still can, while seeing how much, if anything, I can get done. After that, 2013 will come and we’ll see what it brings. Most probably, it’ll be more of the same, only worse, seeing as that has generally been the rule over the past seven years, but there is always some faint hope, even if a fake one.

As you most probably know by now, another school shooting has taken place yesterday in the United States, claiming the lives of 20 children and 7 adults, including the shooter, who appears to have also killed his mother before driving to the school. The result of this is, as always, an emotional reaction demanding stricter gun control laws to be enacted while people are still in shock and unable to think properly because, you know, guns are the biggest threat to the lives of those living in developed countries, having a mind of their own with which they decide to kill people without being operated by anybody.
I wonder, did the people who demand such stricter controls ever take a moment to compare the number of deaths caused over there this year by such shooting sprees with the number of people who died during 2012 as a result of the food they ate, the air they breathed, the water they drank, the stress heaped upon them by society, the medical attention they needed but didn’t receive or the one they did receive but was flawed? Or what about the people who were killed, whether intentionally or by accident, with knives or other potential slashing weapons, ropes or other potential choking devices, baseball bats or other potential blunt weapons, bare hands or other body parts, or even those killed by firearms obtained illegally, the number of which will only increase if it becomes harder to obtain them legally? Or what about the deaths caused by traffic or other transportation-related accidents, workplace accidents, or even bathroom accidents or other accidents taking place at home? Or did any of those people even notice that, also yesterday, 22 children and an adult were injured in China by an attacker wielding nothing but a knife?

I have written about such issues before, both after Breivik’s attack and after the Virginia Tech massacre, so I won’t repeat myself here. In both of those posts you’ll find my opinion about gun control, and about more control in general, and also my view that the fact that some risks will continue to exist can’t and shouldn’t be changed. In addition, particularly in the second of those posts, you will also see my views regarding some of the potential causes for such tragedies and some solutions which should definitely be implemented before running off and demanding to take away the means of self-defense from perhaps millions of responsible individuals for the crimes of a handful who snapped.
What I do want to state here is that those of us who live in stable parts of the world, whether we’re talking about the United States, the countries that are members of the European Union, Japan, Australia or any other place not, or not yet, plagued by insurgents or violent criminal cartels, have enough serious problems to worry about without creating an additional one that doesn’t, in itself, exist. We should be focusing on the environment, on building a society that will readily welcome the tremendous majority of individuals exactly as they are, creating contentment and greatly reducing stress, on moving towards a resource-based economy, on making healthy food readily available for all, on providing good healthcare and education… We have enough things, good and meaningful things, to do to keep us busy for several lifetimes, yet we constantly seem set on finding reasons to keep our eyes focused in the wrong direction.

I’ll start from a summary I found on Realitatea of an article from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Actually, you can find both this summary in an article about international press reactions to the results and another article with some direct quotes from the original piece, so I’ll try to put the two together while still removing the parts that I believe are nothing more than overreacting at the moment:
The people have spoken, Romania has a new Parliament. But it is much worse than before. All the facts were known, yet four out of five Romanians decided to vote without hesitation for corrupt or criminal politicians and are therefore part of the problem. Six out of ten Romanians did not participate in the vote and therefore guaranteed this result. Sunday’s vote result is a catastrophe – for the country and for the EU. Over a third of those elected do not belong in a structure called “Rechtsstaat“. Like all sad votes in the history of Europe, the result in Romania can be explained, but not excused. The victory of USL, which is dominated by pro-Russian, anti-European and anti-Occidental groups, represents a significant risk in a region exposed to the growing influence of Moscow. The Romanian people have chosen on Sunday and they will have to live with the consequences of their choice.

As I said, I removed some other references to the international consequences of the result, because that sounded a little like propaganda and I doubt those from USL are stupid enough to get on the wrong side of the EU and USA twice. They did it once, earlier this year, when they tried to impeach the president and Crin Antonescu repeatedly showed open hostility aimed at the USA, the EU as a whole and Germany in particular, but Victor Ponta did make significant efforts to smooth things over and he seems to have learned a few things since then, including the fact that he needs to hold back his ally more. The fact that PSD is clearly pro-Russian does need to be noted, however, and that truly is a huge cause for concern. Hostility towards the EU and USA can be justified, but anything but an even greater hostility towards Russia, and also China, certainly can’t be.
Still on the topic of that summary, I’d like to make a little correction: Four fifths of those who voted gave their votes for corrupt and criminal politicians, but that only means about a third of the total, considering the turnout. Three fifths, as that article does correctly point out, just guaranteed the result by not voting. But I’ll also say that, while I assume that the four fifths included the votes for USL and ARD, and may or may not include those for UDMR as well, something must also be said about PP-DD. Perhaps they’re not so clearly corrupt and criminal, though they have some issues as well, starting from their leader, but what’s clear is that PP-DD is an extremely stupid choice and likely even more dangerous than either USL or ARD.

The truth is that there were basically no options worth supporting this time. The only ones to field candidates in all the electoral colleges were USL, ARD and UDMR, with PP-DD close but missing a few. PRM, who are also definitely not a valid choice, being right-wing extremists, had candidates in some 63% of the colleges, PER, who are largely ecologists in name only, in only some 39%, and other smaller parties, which I also fail to see as a real option even in theory, in only a handful. That’s because the hatred against PDL (ARD) is so great that USL was able to gather nearly everybody around them in an alliance with the sole purpose of “winning the war against their regime”. Projects, future plans, what’s that? Nobody knows and apparently nobody cares, so other parties, including the Green Party and the Greens’ Movement, accepted to join the alliance and have as little as a single candidate on USL’s lists in exchange for not fielding any on their own.
Personally, I voted for PER, being lucky enough to live somewhere where they had candidates for both chambers, but it was just to say that I did, because even a recent interview with their president proved once again that they have nothing to do with the Green doctrine. They’re very socially conservative, are set against the European Greens, support nuclear as the only option to move away from fossil fuels because “renewables are too expensive”, and are clearly right-wing economically, being mainly interested in economic growth, just done with some care for the environment, stating that they’re not “extremists” to think the other way around. Either way, they got all of 0.78% overall, so it doesn’t matter, even if this means that their candidates averaged around 2%, which would have clearly been the best score Greens or Ecologists would have ever obtained in Romania if they’d have managed to have people in all the colleges.

With the final results just announced, it appears that USL do have more than two thirds of the total seats, as well as more than two thirds of the seats in the Senate. In the Chamber of Deputies they are just shy of two thirds, but the minorities’ group is always allying with whoever governs, so they have well over two thirds there too, without any need for other alliances or negotiations, and therefore there’s nothing stopping them from changing the Constitution as they see fit, switching us to a parliamentary republic led by an unelected prime-minister and with a purely figurehead president. Some of them would want said president to be elected by the Parliament and others would actually prefer a return to monarchy, since they’re just talking figureheads anyway, but they were willing to “compromise” by allowing the people to continue electing the president, as long as the office will be stripped of any real powers, which will be handed over to a prime-minister appointed directly by the party that obtains the most seats.
They plan on some other changes as well, many of which equally worrying, including that of the electoral system. Granted that the current hybrid system is a very bad choice, and it also caused the number of seats to increase from 470 to a staggering 588 at the moment, which creates the somewhat amusing problem of not having enough seats for a joint session, literally, as the large chamber has 501 seats, but it’s still definitely less troubling than the first-past-the-post one they seem keen to implement. Not that they can be blamed for trying at the moment, since under such a system USL would have won 88% of the seats in the Chamber and some 93% in the Senate, but people sure are morons to encourage them towards it by voting for them in such numbers!

To conclude, while PP-DD was, as I said, probably the most dangerous and, to put it bluntly, idiotic choice, PDL (ARD) had created a lot of problems and would have continued to do so, therefore putting them back in control wasn’t an option, the most realistic estimate being that life would have continued to be difficult under their leadership, with little to no real hope of improvement, though the risk of having the situation spiral out of control would have at least been very low. USL, on the other hand, may manage to alleviate some issues in the near future and create a false sense of security for a year or two, but the price will most probably be the fact that things will take a dramatic turn for the worse afterwards, plus that the changes they want to make to fundamental laws and their pro-Russian attitude should be more than enough to completely disqualify them in the mind of anyone capable of thinking things through for at least a few seconds.
Yet options existed, certainly starting from not allowing USL to score such a clear victory, taking away their chance to make all those fundamental changes and making sure that a sufficiently powerful opposition will exist to keep them somewhat in check. In addition, the other parties certainly shouldn’t have joined them, instead choosing to remain independent and take their chances with their own doctrine, therefore giving people a reasonable number of options to choose from. But people are fucking morons and now, as stated in that article that I started from, we all have to pay the price.

Bottom line, as one of the 1.27% of eligible voters, 3.04% of participating voters and 3.15% of voters who cast valid votes who chose something else, voting for parties, or independents, that didn’t make it into the Parliament and therefore aren’t represented in any way, I don’t see why I should be forced to live with the consequences of others’ idiocy, thank you very much. And, while I normally frown at those who don’t vote, this time around I can certainly understand those who lived in areas where the only options were USL, ARD, UDMR, PP-DD and perhaps PRM and could honestly say that they had no options whatsoever, so I’d include them among those who shouldn’t suffer because of others’ choices as well.

After almost making it a rule for a long time, I ended up not writing personal posts on Sunday for the past three weeks. Unfortunately, the reason for that wasn’t that I managed to write two non-personal posts per week and therefore such updates became unnecessary, but quite the contrary, that I couldn’t get myself to write much of anything until most of the week was gone, so had to put a personal post in earlier and then somehow try to push myself into writing something else over the weekend. So, while this return to the usual pattern isn’t a good thing, it’s at least somewhat less bad than that.

But this will be short and to the point, because I plan to watch a lot of handball today, to see what our opponents are doing now that our girls defeated Spain to hold on to their chance of reaching the semifinals. On top of that, I seem to have somehow managed to get back to submitting ranks on MobyGames and have been doing a lot of that this week, so I may actually have a chance to reach the goal I had set for myself at the start of the year. It will require maintaining this rhythm almost all the way to the end of the month though, so it doesn’t look particularly likely, but that’s one more reason to push as hard as I can now that I seem to be set on it.
That actually means that I put the games I bought aside as well, even though I started both Divinity II and Beyond Divinity and decided to try to play the latter first, despite originally meaning to just ignore it, based on what I knew about it. There will be time for these, for Fate of the World and for any others I’ll decide to start or return to, but the year is ending, so there is no more time to lose if I am to still have a chance to get all those submissions in.

Last but not least, my new ISP seems to be doing well enough so far, despite being so much smaller than the one I had before. I expected them to crumble under the traffic generated by all the new customers at first, and there was one moment when it was very slow when most people would have been on-line and doing the same thing I was, but it managed to recover even then and I didn’t experience other issues, so let’s hope they won’t just hold, but also use all this additional income to improve their infrastructure and be able to offer even better services in the future.

The situation in Egypt had been boiling over for the past several days and today, being Friday, will probably mark another major episode. But, of course, this is nothing if not entirely expected, and not merely because of who won the elections there. That’s an important factor and it definitely shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, as no individuals or organizations that base their policies on religion should be allowed to make decisions regarding the daily lives of others who do not necessarily share their views, but that’s hardly the only factor to consider.
Over there, seeing as there was a revolution and a dictator has very recently been overthrown, such a turn of events would have unfortunately been more or less a given regardless of who would have won the elections, and obviously also if there wouldn’t have been any elections organized so quickly. The groups and individuals that unite against a common enemy will obviously turn against each other once again once the bigger threat is eliminated, with those who may in fact be worthy of the newly-vacated positions of authority being quickly pushed aside and the void of power being quickly filled, with the aid of the easily-manipulable masses, by those who should have never been allowed to get anywhere near those positions in the first place. It’s an inherent problem with any political system that currently is or has ever been used by humanity.

But that’s a topic for another time. Now I simply wanted to say that I experienced quite a déjà vu when I read about Mohammed Morsi’s latest speech, seeing as it seemed to have so many similarities with those we have seen from all the rulers from that area, including his predecessor. The difference now is that the protesters are much weaker, but those in power are also much less entrenched, so it remains to be seen how it will play out. What’s clear is that significant events should unfold today, so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on as the day progresses.