My response to Vexler’s response to some guy’s response to Hilary’s response to a question asked by a reporter. The Internet is an Ouroborus of intellectual incest:
Yo, Vlad, thank you for the solid analysis & criticism of an unnecessary dehumanization of a political identity, but I take umbrage with your wine-bar metaphor.
You establish that these three people live with each other, that this is a wine-bar that they frequent, and that this is a weekly (or nightly) discussion that the three share.
Sixty-six percent of the group want a one-hundred and fifty-pound bottle of wine; those two embarked on this shared experience with the understanding that they would only have to pay fifty-pounds to participate. Thirty-three percent of the group demand a bottle that costs thousands. The collective negotiates and eventually settles on a several hundred-pound bottle of wine, expanding the collective obligation to participate to one-hundred-plus pounds per individual.
Fine. Excellent. This is politics and compromise in action.
But what happens the next night when Gaia asks for a several thousand pound bottle of wine? And the night after that? Week after week, month after month, year after year — fifty years, actually; fifty years of gradual concessions, one after the other for the sake of compromise and moderation. And yet the price of the bottle Gaia settles for only goes up.
And then all of a sudden, Maia wakes up one morning, hungover, and realizes that she just spent half-a-months rent on a single night out. So she goes to Laia, the moderate one, and asks, “Hey, I’m a little light, so can we keep tonight to a hundred pounds?”
And Laia’s like, “Sure.”
So they go to the wine-bar, all three of them, and Maia and Laia negotiate and negotiate, and eventually Laia manages to talk Gaia down to a bottle that costs two-hundred and fifty pounds apiece. She takes a victory lap — she slaps Maia on the back and screams, “Aren’t I fucking wonderful?!”
The next night Maia stays home and gets shit-faced on Château d’If: Bottom Shelf Cooking Sherry. It tastes terrible, but it’s a pound-fifty a bottle and at least she’ll be able to pay rent. Laia and Gaia go to the bar to split a several thousand pound bottle of wine and toast to compromise.
The game is played more than once, Vlad.
