Category: Oh God, Politics Page 1 of 2

So, That Shit Is Over With

On January 20, 2021

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics

I am delighted to be on the other side of the inauguration of a president who isn’t an utter moron and see that DC wasn’t overrun by mobs of Truck Nutz enthusiasts. I didn’t watch any of the live streams of the inauguration out of superstitious dread that something awful was bound to happen if I did. It’s the same sort of superstition that I apply to important pitches during baseball games; if I watch every pitch something truly horrific is going to happen and if something glorious happens then, well, that’s what replays are made for. The ick in the White House has been scrubbed away at least until the impeachment begins.

Some things to keep in mind for tomorrow when the sense of immediate relief wears off and we need to start worrying about the aftermath:

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an excellent piece in the Atlantic about how white supremacy was the only consistent unifying thread of Trumpism that you should really read. Even if the content wasn’t pressingly relevant, Coates is such a gifted writer that it is well worth a once over even if you don’t want to invest another smidgen of mental capacity trying to understand what the fuck happened in the United States over the past 4 (italics for sarcasm) years. The expulsion of their poster boy from a seat of power doesn’t lessen their numbers or anything.

2. Of course, Dear Leader had to be persuaded not to promiscuously hand out pardons that might put him in danger both politically and legally. Shameless until the very end.

3.Telcom lobbyist Ajit Pai is out of the FCC which is good news for everyone who leans heavily on an unrestricted internet which, these days, is everyone who does anything and is another thing worth celebrating. Seriously, fuck that guy.

4. The Q cults don’t know which crazy lies to believe now! This would be a lot more funny if there weren’t so damned many of them. I am enjoying the slapstick comedy of watching the Q-anon folks alternately deciding to viciously turn on each other or that maybe Joe Biden is Q.

My Good Intentions Are Worth Less Than The Website They’re Printed On

By goneaway

On December 16, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, This Sucks

I’m starting to think that the perceived ending of the pandemic might actually be effecting my overall mental health more even more than the apocalyptic uncertainty at the beginning of it all. My motivation to do anything even as strenuous as starting a new series on a streaming service has completely fallen off. I’m sure there will be ton of academic work done on the impact of Covid-19 on our collective sanity but it’s hitting me harder than at any point that I remember so far.

The feeling of a continual and torturous walk on a malfunctioning hotel treadmill is the only approximation I can come up with. Maybe that burn is striking in conjunction with our national post-election malaise where something that should have been resolved in a few days keeps dragging on and on until we’re completely burned off all of the outrage built up over the past year. Maybe we’re just tired of better being slightly over the horizon and tantalizingly out of reach. Oh yeah, and then there was the whole series of police murdering people of color to add to the misery as well in addition to the number of people who can’t feed their families because a catastrophic number of businesses have either gone under or struggle to stay open in a time period where a lot of foot traffic is a truly terrible idea. I guess the things I’ve written about above are things I need to think a lot more frequently and seriously about since comparatively I’m only suffering existentially and the Black Lives Matter sign on our lawn doesn’t actually do much of anything.

The Only Sane Explanation of Insane QAnon I’ve Seen

By goneaway

On November 22, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Oh God, Politics, Robot System For Robots

Q Anon is bat shit crazy, right? It should be apparent to most people that the likelihood that celebrities are all baby eating pedophiles all hopped up on Adrenochrome is pretty unlikely to be anything but the product of completely insane theorists of the least discerning kind. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to go away with new batches of freshly hatched lunatics hallucinating, connecting the dots between their hallucinations and other people’s hallucinations, and eventually getting together (online or otherwise) to either congratulate each other on being totally nuts or, you know, doing something crazy that involves too many guns and a bunch of cops. It makes no sense to me at all but then again neither does Christianity.

It really took someone with some insight into understanding what caused people to voluntarily alter their reality to present their perspective on it for the edges to align for me. This very long and extensive look at QAnon via a game developer who’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to best design immersive alternate reality is the best attempt I’ve reading at trying to understand the zeitgeist crazy of QAnon without completely discounting those who find themselves sucked into it. You should read it. It made me feel less dismissive about the folks who end up painting themselves into this ridiculous corner.

Too Many Open Tabs: A Tragedy

By goneaway

On November 18, 2020

In Apple, Baseball, Oh God, Politics, Robot System For Robots

Once more it is time to dump a bunch of links before my browser has a nervous breakdown since it’s already unstable enough.

1. Craig Calcaterra posted his reasoning behind opposing Curt Schilling as a candidate for the Baseball Hall of Fame and it’s worth reading if you have any conflicted feelings about giving awards like this to garbage people. Calcaterra says it better than I could, for obvious reasons:

But we are not what we believe in our heart of hearts. We are what we do, and what he has done is to use his considerable celebrity to spread lies, conspiracy theories and hatred, the sort of which have gotten people killed in the past and will get more people killed in the future. He has not done this as some dumb, one-off comment in an interview nor has he done it ignorantly in a way that might lead one to believe he’s simply uninformed, easily swayed, or perhaps not well, mentally speaking. He is an intelligent man who has consciously pursued the agenda he has followed as a means of making himself a media star or, potentially, a political candidate. It’s odious. And it’s dangerous.

You should also subscribe to Cup of Coffee if you care about baseball because his writing is always worth reading.

2. I know that most people who read a lot of things on the web don’t need to read much more about the human impact of Covid-19. We’ve seen the pictures of victims stacked in hospital hallways and refridgerated trucks. The horror about the pandemic and its disgusting mismanagement has already had our attention and anger more than enough. What is worth taking a few minutes to read to temper that horror with humanity is the story of the impact of the second wave on a small South Dakota town and a doctor who lives there. It’s heart rending and grounded in perspective and is illustrative of the fact that everywhere is a disaster in these dark days after the virus was just supposed to magically fade away.

The paragraph about his parents who were casualties of the pandemic and the parallels between their experiences of sacrifice during WWII are encapsulated brilliantly:

A lot of people have suffered worse losses to this virus. My dad was over 100. My parents lived a good life, and they were at the end of their road. They got married 76 years ago during World War II once they’d finally saved up enough of their sugar rations to bake a proper wedding cake. They loved telling that story. Everybody was sacrificing for the war. It was a national effort. They were proud of it. The country had bigger problems, and their wedding cake could wait.

3. Meanwhile, in less human than others-land, Lindsey Graham might actually suffer some consequences for his actions. In this case, it was giving the hard sell to Georgia’s Secretary of State about eliminating as many legally valid ballots from tabulation as possible. There simply aren’t enough bad things in the world to give this man back the ill that he’s done to the world during his time in office.

4. Huh. I may be in the market for one of the new M1 machines in the not so distant future. I’m not best friends with the operating system (although my experience so far with Big Sur has been relatively smooth) but it looks like the claims are turning out to be true about the M1’s performance. I’ll be damned. I’m probably of the more cautious bent given that we’ve seen mostly benchmarks which are good for measuring performance but not necessarily use over time. I would also like more ports.

Some Stuffs From the Webs

By goneaway

On November 13, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics

Still getting acclimated to the ebb and flow of my new gig and mostly working through lunches at the moment so time hasn’t been on my side for wasting scads of time doom scrolling lately. Here’s what ended up on Pinboard:

1. The Donald J Trump Presidential Library site is brilliantly done. I’d seen mention of it in a few places but (incorrectly) assumed that it would be disappointing. It is not. Maybe I’ve just grown so tired of seeing that man’s name in print and the expected bluster, xenophobia, and obsession with how he is seen by the world that I just tuned it out earlier. It is worth a visit if only because it’s better designed than most non-parodies associated with real libraries and museums. Top notch stuff all the way around folks!:

History has judged the former President to be criminally negligent in the death of thousands of American citizens, morally bankrupt in treatment of immigrants, and vastly amoral in race relations in empowering white nationalism.

With our Criminal Records Room, you can do the research on how YOU would prosecute Trump’s crimes against humanity!

2. In an unfortunately similar vein is My Little Crony. It visualizes all of gross business connections between Tory politicians and various companies getting government contracts during the pandemic. It’s ~~good~~ ~~comforting~~ less humiliating as an American to know that we’re not alone in our beleaguerment by the corruption of our elected officials. Not that this was ever necessarily a question or anything.

3. I’m glad that Google is doing something with the still fresh leftovers from its failed forays into VR that doesn’t involve them slowly bit-rotting in an unmaintained state while a group of adherents try to keep the content afloat. We could all use a walk somewhere far away right now. The only issue is that you can’t walk there and stay permanently. That sounds nice right about now.

4. I also learned today that following a half bag of Zapp’s Voodoo chips with an unintentional gulp of coffee is a grave error that can only be undone with vigorous toothbrushing and an optional minty mouthwash chaser. It’s the umami version of the ol’ toothpaste and orange juice disaster and I would not wish it on anyone else.

5. This article over at Slate gives me much more hope after the sheer number of editorials I’ve read over the past few weeks that have basically said that Biden’s appointments are going to nearly impossible to get past the Senate. I strongly believe that Mitch McConnell should be sealed into a capsule and fired at high velocity to the Moon since he doesn’t seem interested in doing much for either his state or the country. Any public servant that single-mindedly focused on gaining and consolidating political power needs to be retired in the interplanetary sense. Poof! Goodbye! Don’t worry about samples! No one wants you to come back.

The Same Idiots Who Loved Calling You ‘Snowflake’ Now Fleeing The Repressive Notion of Being Held Accountable For Their Stupid, Stupid Words

By goneaway

On November 12, 2020

In Oh God, Politics, Sad Spam Poetry, This Sucks

Now that things seem less hospitable for racist Trumpists terrified of factual evidence backed by observation in the real, actual world that we all inhabit they’re being encouraged to ditch the toxic wasteland of Twitter for its right wing discount equivalent Parler.

I’m not an avid Twitter user by any means but I do enjoy a quick stumble down into Lack of Reading Comprehension-Land when major news events happen just to see how LOL-worthy the public reaction is. Well, that and baseball. I do not consider Twitter a news source (excepting baseball trade rumors) so I don’t treat content there with any more seriousness than I do the unread copy pasta that fills up Facebook timelines. I do enjoy the idea of my flow of baseball gossip being less frequently interrupted with inflammatory word salad from sources even more questionable than social media sites. That exodus of folks who habitually misuse their caps lock key doesn’t sound awful to me. I suppose I can find other rich veins of unintentional comedy to mine in other places.

Hilariously, the wide open spaces dedicated to the unfettered venting of spleen don’t seem to magnetically attract the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is all fine and good for the folks making a few bucks swindling the rubes by repackaging worthless opinions from our own stupid shores but I worry, only a little, that the level of internet discourse will somehow get even more poisonous and concentrated by purposeful isolation from other ideas. I suppose that’s an idiotic thing to trouble me in this of all years. You can read all about Josiah Motley’s experiences on the platform here. It sounds pretty horrific and not something I can’t convince myself is a good idea to try myself. It just seems like more trash than I can cope with.

Probably About Time For Some Words

By goneaway

On November 10, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

Although Joe Biden wasn’t my first or even second choice for a presidential candidate given his propensity for being a grabass of slightly less odious proportions than the asshole we’re trying to get rid of, I’m glad someone reasonable seeming won the election. I think another full term of Trump would have finished off the tattered remnants of the United States. I don’t think that my positive reaction has nearly as much to do with Biden’s election as it does with the election of a woman of color as Vice President. I’m glad that shit is over with and we can now just amuse ourselves with watching judges bat down ridiculous lawsuits and then of course the Four Seasons press conference/slapstick comedy hour was just more icing on a cake already slick with sugar.

My wife is officially discharged and home from the hospital. She’s going to have to use a walker for a while and is having some interesting challenges navigating our house which has about as many stairs as any newly built house possibly could in even the worst case. It’s going to be a while until she’s fully recovered and we won’t know how much her leg will recover from the strokes until much further down the line of physical therapy and healing. It is good to have her home.

I also started a new job today which pays more and is potentially more interesting work. I can’t and won’t mention the company but I’m hoping to actually manage to stay at one company for more than two years. It has been a while and the job market for systems admin work that isn’t centered around AWS is slightly better than it was a couple of years ago so there is at least a little pressure to try to keep us happy and in place. It was probably the worst time to start something new but I had two choices of start dates and the thought of remaining at my old job for another month was unbearable.

That’s where I’m at. How the hell are you?

Don’t Know If My Anxiety Is Better But Boy Am I Tired

By goneaway

On November 5, 2020

In Oh God, Politics

Right now, collectively, we’re kind of hovering somewhere between impatience while slow tallying regions (mainly because a certain party made sure that votes could not be counted until Election Day) and the reserved urge to celebrate early. Is that out of a sense of propriety or just because we don’t want to jinx anything? I’m not sure but I’ve been watching more broadcast television over the past 24 hours than I have in the past 3 years and I’m kind of worn out watching the various pundits try to fill airtime. I’m hoping that when I wake up tomorrow we’ll have a solidified idea of what is going on with the election and I can stop panic refreshing 15+ tabs in my browser. I sincerely hope for my own sense of feeling like I’m actually a part of this country that I do not awake to news like I did in 2016.

I am hoping that against all hope that some groundswell for an eventual abolition of the electoral college is mounting while we nervously wait for the election results. I have a feeling that regardless of your political affiliation most people are exhausted by the weird speculation about election results skewed by states with small populations. A popular vote would be so much simpler and remove that weird pressure to spend time and effort trying to impress racists in flyover states. Less attention paid to places that fit the above description seems like a beneficial effect.

I’m tired and going to sleep in any case. Tomorrow I get so spend some time with physical therapists to figure out how to best support my wife and her new mobility limitations when she comes home in two days. That is worthy of some celebration.

Election Day Anxiety

By goneaway

On November 3, 2020

In Oh God, Politics

I have a difficult time with elections in the same way that I have a difficult time being around giant Nagios dashboards. Being continuously confronted with too much information makes me incredibly tense especially when it amounts to a slow tally of varying types of ballots across an enormous and politically divided country. I’m going to try to avoid looking into results until much later in the day which means I won’t be looking at most of the newsfeeds I perpetually distract myself with for most of the day.

And The Horse You Rode In On

By goneaway

On October 31, 2020

In Oh God, Politics, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

As much as understanding as I might pretend to have for whatever-driven advertising rates, I’ve been pretty sure that Facebook is the source of most horrible things in the world and would never remotely consider feeding any of my money into that ridiculous machine. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people consider that shit machine as the 2020 equivalent of thinking of the big blue ‘E’ of the Internet Explorer icon as the ‘internet.’ Given how much computing is done on mobile devices this almost makes sense but then you read something like this disassembly of advertising rates charged to both presidential campaigns and realize that the chaos boosting algorithms Facebooks prioritizes gives a ridiculous advantage to a candidate that doesn’t give a fuck about policy or the impact any of the trash his grotesque orange orifice spews.

I’m sick as fuck of even hearing about Facebook much less their half assed justifications for doing measurable harm to democratic process by measuring all things regardless of their impact with the same inane system of measuring ‘engagement.’ I still have an active Facebook account and the fact that it still exists, albeit largely as a way to log in to Spotify, is making me feel like I’m a larger part of the problem than I’m comfortable with.