Venn Diagrams

 

I tend to love the damn things (Venn Diagrams that is).  I find them interesting in the sense that they do provide a visual to kick off thinking about a subject.  I usually manage over time to start modifying them in my head.   They aren’t really all that good a way to accurately depict nuance and conflict within the particular system, but they ça donne à réfléchir.

Consider the simple diagram above.  This is (to me at least) a reasonable view of how to discuss politics in America.  I think that the colors accurately reflect how most of my friends view the situation. 

But I think that it is really not all that easy.  The sizes of the pinkish and the bluish right/wrong circles are not exactly equal as shown, even worse, the labels can be swapped by merely changing who is looking at it.  It is kind of a “Schroedinger’s label” kind of event, where you can imagine the labels in a digital closet somewhere and they only settle down, almost randomly on one of the two circles on you see above when someone allows them on the computer screen.

I suppose that what I worry about the most is that the little football shape that is the intersection of right and wrong where realistic compromises can be made is shrinking.  The two circles are moving away from each other and the space where compromises can be made is shrinking.

I think that I read somewhere that a significant minority of the US feels that an upcoming civil war is in the cards.  I have a hunch that there is no valid and falsifiable methodology that the yellow journalist who wrote the piece can produce to support his/her claim (label warning: I do not consider polls valid as their statistical universe is always constructed to support a pre-existing opinion).  But in this case, if I were to pull an opinion out of my ass (like the original writer, what sauce for the goose after all) I would not disagree with the 40% estimate, but rather hedge my claim by stating +/- 15%.

Politics is an odd beast that sleeps in the purplish intersection above.  Politics is also the human means of everything not turning into an oversized barroom brawl.  The solutions that politics gives you never really make anyone happy, it just makes the solution offered not worth fighting about.

The way that the country seems to be moving is that the sideways movement of the two circles is proceeding apace and the little football shape is growing smaller.  All I can hope for is that their speed doesn’t increase.