Everything I know about politics I learned from playing SimCity
If you play SimCity3000 in absoulte marathon setions, leaving the game running for months at a time, a rather anoying bug comes up. Roughly every 600 years of game-time the population just falls through the floor. Tax base disapears. Budget overruns. And nothing you seem to do is ablew to stop ot from happening.
There are a lot of other bugs in the game also. The number that measures land value if it grows high enough will ‘wraps around’ back to zero. Making a deal with a neighboring city on the water pipe system will sometimes get glitch and make the computer think you violated the terms of the contract when you didnt. These, along with the periodic population crash bug, had dedicated fans complaining to Maxis corp to release a software patch to fix the gameplay.
Maxis pointed out something that is actualy very insightful. Ok, the water bug and the land value bug they could work on. But the population bug is unfixable. Users demanded to know why. “Guys, we didnt put that there” Maxis responded. “Economic systems just DO that sometimes. We just made a accurate enough simulator that it mimics what real markets do automaticly”
This totaly flies in the face of the common assumption that anything and everything that happens in life, must have happened because someone caused it to happen. First assume the gamers must not be very good at playing. Find someone very skilled at playing sim city and that crash wont happen. But when this is disproven the search instantly turns to someone else who we can label as pupetmaster and say that the things going on was becasuse of them pulling the strings. The software programs are blamed next and its assumed that the population crash happens because some programer put it there. But this isnt true either.
Extremest hardline scientisism types can at least partialy grasp this idea. Eveolution for them is something that ‘just happened’. There dosent require any intelegence behind it. No design. No planing or forethought. There isnt any pupetmaster for evelution that guids and shapes its develepoment. No ‘intelegence’ behind it that creats a ‘design’. Its just a bunch of stuff that happens.
But for most other things, there is a despere need to believe that things are planed. Im old enough to remember when Coca-Cola changed its formula and it was a disastar that forced them to change back. Theory abounded at the time that it was all a plan. Coca-Cola had set the whole thing up as a marketing ploy to get publicity for themselves. Coca-Cola President Donald R. Keough rejected these conspiracy theories when he said ‘Supposing it was all a plan. A COKE plan. The truth is, we’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart’
The current economic crisis in the united states of the housing and banking sectors if just part of a very regular cycle. Every decade or so, the whole thing crashes. Housing meltdown of the late 00s. Dot com bubble of the late 90s. Black Monday of the late 80s. Gas shortag of the late 70s. Nobody was in a back room saying ‘our plans are working perfectly! In another 2 years we will cause another crash’. Yet theoris about that the housing meltdown was all caused on purpose. Either by greedy wallstreet types exploting the system for their own gain or by a buch of men sitting around a confrence table in a darkened room with a spotlight shining down on each chair who are planing on institutiong a new one world government.
This week porn producer Bob Zicari pleaded guilty to violating terms the codes of the US post office when he distributed his videos. He had been fighting the case for years, even having once in 2005 had a judge rule the post office codes as unconstitutional (if owning the vids was legal, you couldent make iligeal the method of getting them). This was one of the most positive things to happen to the porn industry in ages. Legal battles being what they were, the case continued to drag out. But just when it looked like Zicari would finaly win and settle once and for all a huge victory for sexual privacy rights, he threw in the towel and quit. Pleaded guilty and now paitently awaits the posible setence of jail time that might be comming his way.
Why? Why now? What changed? Why give up when your winning? Well, those who belive that the population crash in SimCity was caused by the software programer believe it was partt of a plan from on high. Every time up untill now the ‘evil bush dictatorship’ was in charge and lead a prudish victorian minded crusade againt porn producers. But now that nice, friendly, tolerant, open minded Obama is in, sexual freedom is now secure. Hope and change!
Supose for a moment the trial was all part of a plot from oh high. It wasent, but if it was, wouldnt NOTGUILTY 4 years ago and GUILTY today be an indication that things are getting worse for porn? Not better?
Obscenity trials go back and forth all the time. The ‘2 live crew’ obscenity trial found them guilty, then overturned on appeal all under one president. The radio station on George Carlins ‘7 dirty words’ trial was found iniocent, then found guilty on the appeal all onder one president. The CDA was passed into law, chalanged, worked its way all the way up through the supreme court and was ruled unconstitutional all under one president. Julie Amero (computer in the classroom that accedently showed porn on a popup ad in front of the class) was tried, found guilty, vacated, retried, then pleaded guilty to a lesser charge all under one president. All of these obscenity trials that changed didnt have the change happen because of a changing presidency.
Why are so many people so married to the idea that anything and everything that happens in life is because someone at the top, or working behind the scnes, is planing it to turn out that way?