Tag: Politics

July 4

I am not going to delve into the irony of celebrating the independence of the United States from England while the country is busily installing our first king ourselves. Anyone likely to be reading this shares the same existential dread I do but that is a different conversation. What I want to talk about today is explosions.

I don’t know if the brain-stem level enthusiasm for blowing things up is uniquely American or something that is just a product of the recklessness of youth but either way, people just don’t let up. Fireworks are, as far as I know, illegal county-wide now but that doesn’t really seem to have discouraged anyone.

The hypocrisy coming off this post is obscuring my screen, so allow me to justify my change of stance. Not just change, I suppose, but polar reversal. I was as mindlessly enthusiastic about blowing stuff up in my youth as anyone and, like most American males, the recklessness of youth lasted well into my 30s. Since then, however, I have had a number of experiences which have led me to change my position. The key experiences, unsurprisingly, were working in an ER, developing a hyperactive startle response1, and owning a dog. As I have aged the risk to my own personal fingers, toes, ears, and nose has diminished considerably of course but one still has a certain sympathy for the people who will spend the rest of their lives, starting tomorrow, unable to count to twenty unassisted. The startle and the dogs continue to be an issue in the household. Having a ninety pound dog trying to hide underneath you because some yabbo in the street set off a firecracker is a unique experience.

I suspect nothing is going to change how my fellow Americans choose to celebrate their rapidly vanishing freedoms so if anyone needs me I will be hiding under the bed with the dogs.

  1. It is possible that these two things are related. ↩︎

Hey, Isn’t it an Election Year?

Alert readers may have noticed that, unlike previous incarnations of my blogery, news and politics have been absent from all three or four posts I’ve made since the latest resurrection. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, anyone likely to be reading this also, likely, aligns closely with my own political views. “Preaching to the choir” is the applicable phrase here.

Second, as I believe I have mentioned previously, this is a really shitty time in history to have and anxiety disorder1. I have been something of a news junkie in the past but I just can’t handle this election cycle. In the past, not that long ago, worrying that a major-party candidate was going to engineer a coup if they didn’t win would have been the irrational anxiety, now it’s barely newsworthy.

I am aggressively trying to avoid the news. I am going to attempt to withhold comment except to say, if the country makes it through this election more or less unscathed I may have to rethink my opinion on the existence of the divine.

  1. To be fair, I can’t really think of a good time in history to have an anxiety disorder. Maybe April 11, 1954. ↩︎

I’d like to see more of this

I tried to find a copy of this clip that isn’t embedded in someone’s tweet but I couldn’t so here it is. This is Illinois Governor Pritzker dealing with a right-wing nutbag reporter at a press briefing about the state’s Covid response.

Semi-accurate transcript:

Right-Wing Nutbag Reporter (RWNBR): [recording starts mid-sentence] …protests out here this morning and parents were crying, as governor you should try and calm people’s nerves, maybe, or can you? Because there are low risk groups too…

Unidentified Woman (UW) (off screen): Amy, as a supposed reporter, you should probably stop the misinformation. We are done here. Thank you.

Gov. Pritzker: Thank you. [starts to walk away from podium]

UW (still off screen): You know how you stop schools from being closed? You stop complaining about mask wearing.

[inaudible cross-talk, RWNBR appears to say something like “…read some of those studies”]

Gov. Pritzker: [walks back to podium] I’m going to take the podium again and just respond to that. Let me just say this; you are spreading misinformation. I wish you would stop spreading misinformation. You come in here with a political agenda and you spread misinformation and I just think you should stop. We now need to protect our children, we need to protect the people in our communities, parents, grandparents, teachers; you are working against that. And it is extremely upsetting for all of us who are trying to keep the rest of the state safe. [Walks away from podium]

Remarkable self-awareness

Again stepping away from the cancer doom-and-gloom for a moment, I ran across the above comment in a libertarian discussion forum. I thought it perfectly encapsulated the thought process of the overwhelming majority of self-identified “libertarians”, especially the mental gymnastics required to somehow be wrong about everything all the time.

For those who can’t effectively see the tiny text, it reads as follows;

We’ve spent years with the position that we didn’t need the state to force us to behave. That we could be smart and responsible without having our hands held.

And then in the span of a year, a bunch of you idiots who are definitely reading this right now went ahead and did everything you could to prove that no, we definitely are NOT smart enough to do anything intelligent on our own, and that we apparently DO need the government to force us to not be stupid.

All you had to do was either get a shot OR put a fucking mask on and stop getting sick for freedom. But no, that was apparently too much to ask. So now the state has all the evidence they’ll ever need that, without being forced to do something, we’re too stupid to do it.

So thanks for setting us back, you dumb fucks.

Edit: I’m getting called an authoritarian bootlicker for advocating that people be responsible voluntarily. Awesome, guys.

Some Rando on the Internet

Several people, myself included, have mentioned that movies like Jaws have to be re-evaluated in the light of the pubic and especially political response to the pandemic. I have never had much faith that the general public will behave responsibly, even under the most extreme circumstances, but I always raged about how unrealistic Jaws was because the mayor of the town refused to close public beaches in spite of the fact that it was nearly certain that more people would be killed by the shark. I couldn’t imagine anyone being that stupid and shortsighted. I think it’s pretty clear now that many (most?) politicians would opt for the easy, expedient solution that is beneficial in the very short term even if it means worse political fallout in the medium- to long term. Like keeping businesses open because “ERMAHGHERD TEH ECONOMIES!” even though that means thousands of people will die a few weeks from now.

All this goes to explain why we’re looking at yet another Covid surge and could potentially be seeing 200,000 new cases per day nationwide again by October.

Keep wearing your masks.

Edited to add;

Or, and stay with me here, it is just possible that some of us don’t wish death on people with whom we disagree politically. Crazy to think, huh?

This pandemic is never going to end.

edited further to add;