This Cannot Be

Christopher Carr

Christopher Carr does stuff and writes about stuff.

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3 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    This seems like something that will be quantified perfectly until the measurements stop working.

    Like the perfect candidate might be pieced together, long legal career, a great deal of time in management positions and adjacent to management positions (like, in addition to management positions, married to someone in a high management position), a great deal of experience with elected positions, a great deal of experience with appointed positions, and knows everybody who knows everybody and owes them all about half as many favors as they owe him or her.

    And we wake up one day when this perfect candidate loses a presidential election to some wacky out-of-left field candidate that nobody even thinks about taking seriously because of a whole bunch of things that they didn’t know how to measure and since these technocrats didn’t know how to measure it, they figured it wasn’t relevant.

    I mean, awesome dystopia, I just see something like this being a dystopia that blows up in the faces of the assessment team and gets outplayed *HARD* by team chaos.Report

  2. DavidTC says:

    I’m not quite sure how this is a dystopia? Is the premise that this committee is *in charge* of determining who is president, or who can run?

    If so, obviously that’s a problem.

    If not…well, that’s the media’s job. Turning it into some non-partisan committee would be an interesting idea, but utterly pointless as it would immediately be something the right wing media would attack and cause the people who *need* to be listening to it not to.

    Is it the dumbass committee-speak the dystopia? I’d assume there would be a summary presented at some point.

    Or is the dystopia that, in 2054 (Or later?), we will be talking about eradicating malaria by 2070? Come on, people we can do a lot better than that. We should be able to get it done by 2054 if we just, you know, fund the efforts.Report

    • “I’m not quite sure how this is a dystopia? Is the premise that this committee is *in charge* of determining who is president, or who can run?”

      Yes.

      “If so, obviously that’s a problem.”

      Why do you think so? I bet you there are many who would disagree.

      “If not…well, that’s the media’s job. Turning it into some non-partisan committee would be an interesting idea, but utterly pointless as it would immediately be something the right wing media would attack and cause the people who *need* to be listening to it not to.”

      Does that media do a better job influencing the Presidential election than a committee would? Is it good that the media has such an influential role in determining the leader of the free world?

      “Is it the dumbass committee-speak the dystopia? I’d assume there would be a summary presented at some point.”

      What do you think?

      “Or is the dystopia that, in 2054 (Or later?), we will be talking about eradicating malaria by 2070? Come on, people we can do a lot better than that. We should be able to get it done by 2054 if we just, you know, fund the efforts.”

      I was hoping there would be more discussion about this topic in particular.

      Dystopias should be complex and multi-layered, and they should allow individual readers to have unique imagined experiences. We all experience reality differently. We all experience fiction differently.Report