ABOUT

This website looks at great issues through the lens of crunchiness: is what is happening, or being proposed, crunchy?

It is entirely focused on policies and actions to address the great issues that confront the US and our people: this, after all, is why we have a government and a body politic.

It is easy to forget this:

• Politicians – certainly those with a high profile – are entertainers the quality of whose performance is measured by how effective they are at skewering other politicians and viewpoints held by other politicians, usually when those other politicians are not present to defend and explain.
• Media is complicit in this game, egging on those politicians and – the 24 hour cable news channels especially – rotating in talking head ‘experts’ to further elaborate and reinforce those ‘skewerings’, again with no counter viewpoints admissable.

Meanwhile the country’s business is not being done, the people’s interest are ignored.

Crunchicrant is laser focused on a few key issues that will really impact our lives and the success of the country: and it will be relentless in covering those issues, all aspects of them and nothing swept under the carpet, solutions and the trade-offs that any solution will contain, policy of government and any rational and credible opposition to government, and actual progress towards addressing those key issues.

Crunchiness as understood in this website was conceived by journalist Nico Colchester, in a fine piece of journalism.

Things are crunchy when events and their impact on individuals are closely and directly connected:

• in crunchy systems events impact the individual – and the individual can influence events through intellectual honesty and by taking actions.
• in soggy systems (the opposite) outcomes are loosely connected to events – the outcome is the same, or similar, no matter the events and in this situation the individual cannot, much, influence the outcome (so why try?).

Crunchiness can be cruel – for example, ill health and bad luck could (perhaps unfairly) adversely impact an individual in a crunchy system, whereas in a soggy system that bad stuff may be spread around among the community.

As Colchester points out sogginess is in demand everywhere (and is not the preserve of one or other political party): civilization itself is an exercise in creating safety nets – so in sogginess: but therein has lain the destruction of every civilization til now – how long can western civilization (and the US is the leader of that civilization) last?

Because crunchiness can be harsh, people have and may in the future want to build social constructs that provide a more equable society and to shelter people from the impacts of misfortune.

That is rational, desirable – but it is also dangerous: Crunchicrant looks for the narrow path towards progress that avoids the moral hazard of sogginess and, ultimately, of destruction.

Crunchicrant is about recognizing issues; talking about them with everyone; figuring out how to resolve them; and getting on with the task – it abhors ducking issues, hiding them and kicking the can down the road.

Crunchicrant is non partisan It asks that big issues are recognized (it’s extraordinary, but presently they are not), that through democratic processes, a consensus around how to tackle them is found, and the country get on and address them.  These issues have all been apparent for 40 years, but politicians, we the people, have kicked the can down the road and they are now urgent – it is imperative that our leaders grab the issues: we the people must insist that they do and follow their lead.  Abraham Lincoln, in the Gettysburg address and referring to the founding principles of the country, asked whether the “nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”. These ‘big issues’ are flea bites compared to the issues of the 1860s, but in their way they are even more of a challenge to our type of country for they are ‘boil the frog slowly’ issues which can drag the country down before we know we are in trouble: can a democratic republic face up to them and deal with them – if it cannot, the future belongs to autocracies and the great American experiment will fade, and with it western civilization, pulled down by a lack of crunchiness, lack of urgency: rotting from within.