Apr 08

None of Above

To be clear, I will never vote for Trump. But I will also never vote for Biden. Why participate in the con because some centrists like the below demand it? Look at where listening to those numpties has gotten us: nowhere.

Not gonna do it.

Apr 08

Big F

And I don’t have any patience at all for useless wankers who tell me I have to accept evil because some other evil might be, arguably, somewhat more evil.

Fuck you and everything you stand for.

Apr 08

Ordering

Exactly. Some people have watched too much Star Trek. A borderless, global government might be a nice fantasy and if it’s possible, it might happen in 500 to 1,000 years (I have my doubts).

However — and this is a big however — that’s not the world we live in right now. We are nowhere adjacent to that place. It’s not some minor or non-traumatic transition. As in Star Trek, it’d probably take a catastrophe far larger than Covid-19 to get to any such world. (In the ST world it was massive, civilization-shattering nuclear wars.)

Right now we are stuck with nations. Without them, capital sloshes around the world with no restrictions and no loyalty in addition to a lot of other bad things mentioned in the tweet. Nations are the tool we have to work with. Is it the best? No. Does throwing a fit that we don’t have the unicorn space laser tool that we really wish we had help? Also no.

It’s nations or nothing for the moment. Get used to it.

Apr 08

WHO Not When

Fuck the WHO. Likely they’ll be responsible with their BS about mask-wearing for 20,000+ deaths. They should all be fired at the least, and being tried for crimes against humanity would be more appropriate. I don’t give a damn what Trump does to the WHO; they deserve it.

Apr 08

High Fant

What America Needs Next: A Biden National Unity Cabinet.

It’s amazing Thomas Friedman is still paid to write utter claptrap like this. There are millions better and more perceptive writers. At least. And of course there will and can be no national unity while roughly 40% of the country does not even agree on basic facts and that science is real.

This is high fantasy; puts Tolkien to shame. But it’s a way of making sure nothing changes, just like always.

Apr 08

Hoping

I’d never seen this performance before. I was in the army by that time so I missed it. It’s interesting how Hope Sandoval’s stage presence is so commanding though she hardly moves, barely does a thing. She just has a still sort of confidence, a serenity, that defies all notions of how one should be on stage but it works perfectly for her. It’s like not only does she not care in the least that anyone is watching, but she doesn’t even know. As with Rorschach in Watchmen, she’s not here with us — we’re here with her.

Apr 08

Holmes Slice

I liked Home Before Dark probably more than other people would.

The reason is that I identified with the protagonist just so very much. She’s a misfit, a nine-year-old journalist and someone out of place no matter where she is. She’s precocious and adults constantly doubt her knowledge and capabilities and of course lie to her. One of the first few lines of her narration is in fact, “Since I’m a kid, people lie to me all the time.”

When I was that age, I’d been reading adult-level books for four years already. I knew more than almost any adult around me about anything. I constantly had people explaining topics to me that I knew far better than they did — and would get very angry when I demonstrated my knowledge and caught them in their obvious and absurd lies. So yes, I identify with Hilde very much indeed.

Also something important and related. It’d be called “gaslighting” today I guess, but it was perfectly handled how the adults in her life constantly invalidate and discredit her very accurate perceptions of events, even attempting to cajole her into denying her own experiences. I remember that all too well. There was no quicker way at the time to spark adult rage than to call them out on this!

So yes, I do have a lot of leftover resentment from that time. Watching the show was a way to disencumber myself of a bit of it.

Also familiar: even her own father rails at her to just be more normal and to try to act more like everyone else. “Dammit, Hilde, why can’t you just be a little kid for just once in your life?!” is a line he uses. My dad said nearly identical things to me constantly, just with even more cursing.

The scene where Hilde is walking into her school and everyone is gazing at her with undisguised derision and disdain — I’ve lived that. It was perfectly done. The writer who wrote that had almost certainly lived that too.

There’s another great scene with the principal telling the protagonist’s mother that something Hilde does is “developmentally inappropriate for her age.” I had teachers tell me and my parents that same phrase numerous times, including after one incident that was very similar to what Hilde herself did in the show. To my mom’s credit, she responded, “I doubt it, since he’s been doing it since he was six.” (I was 10 at the time.)

Writing a paper in my spare time (as Hilde does) is literally what I almost got expelled for in ninth grade, so Hilde having the same issues is very resonant with me indeed.

It’s hard for me to determine if the show is good or not because of the consonance with my own life and experiences. I think so, but I cannot separate the two enough to tell.