This all seems so strange to me.

When I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, I must have spent hundreds of hours in the car waiting for one or both of my parents in stores.

I hated stores and was not well-behaved, so it was a good place for me to wait.

By the way, this was not unusual. It was very, very, very common to have kids wait in cars, even in Florida where I grew up.

This is one small part of the social changes that I discuss from time to time on this site that many people seem intent on denying but that are common and numerous.

I don’t really care much about the Sad Puppies’ political leanings.

Neofascism is not all that neo- anymore. It’s a permanent strain of and stain on world politics in the modern era.

I don’t care about bloc voting either. Any voting system is susceptible to it; most such as our American party system absolutely depend on it. The Hugo voting numbers are always so small that it has almost certainly been gamed in the past.

No, what I care about is that the works nominated by the Puppies are bad. Bad sf. Boring works. Substandard bordering on abysmal.

I’ve read some works in the past where the politics are disagreeable or disgusting but that I still liked. I know many people can’t separate the two but I can easily. So I do.

However, none of the Sad Puppies’ creative output that I’ve examined so far would’ve gotten printed in the average middling high school newspaper.

They are all terrible. And that’s really what bothers me the most.

Language fluency is a spectrum.

I meant to write about it the other day and then lost the link, but I saw some moronic linguist claiming that no one was “truly” multi-lingual — basically that someone being fluent in four or five languages is an impossibility.

Of course that linguist was using “fluent” basically to mean “knows absolutely every word in every language one claims to know.”

I work with a woman who is demonstrably fluent in German, French, English, Spanish and Russian. I’ve heard her speak all but Russian, conversing with native speakers in each. She has no problems at all making herself understood and understanding each language in turn.

Is she fluent? By any normal measure.

Yet I am quite sure because I am a word collector that I know some words in French that she does not — so by that measure the linguist-not-worthy-of-the-name would say she’s not truly fluent in French. Yet her practical French is far, far better than mine will probably ever be.

Fluency is a spectrum. Can not be anything else.

With the SJW “absolutely everything is racism and appropriation” crowd on one side and the “women should be in the kitchen and evolutionary psychology explains everything” crowd on the other side, it’s a good time to be a misanthrope.

Polarization is increasing; studies show this.

When you’re non-tribal in nature and care more about being on the side with the evidence in its favor what do you do when you have no side?

Whine a lot, like I do.

Hey, it’s the American way. And I have to do some American things too I guess.

I agree with the posters below this piece who says milk chocolate is for children.

When I was young I remember not liking chocolate all that much. And then going to the UK in the late 80s and deciding on someone’s recommendation to buy a chocolate bar despite it costing two pounds (five times as much as a bar in the US).

Damn, what a difference. It contained actual cacao that you could taste. It was rich, flavorful and didn’t taste like someone was squirting sugar straight into your mouth.

After that I was a dark chocolate devotee. (In most European countries it is almost impossible to find chocolate of the terrible quality of almost all US chocolate.)

So now when I buy chocolate it’s usually got 60%-80% cacao content.

So much better.

Milk chocolate is indeed for children.

And Americans, I guess.

This is why voting is pointless, especially when it comes to anything that actually matters.

A 2014 Princeton University study comparing 1,779 policy outcomes to more than 20 years of public opinion data found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Assuming absolutely everyone voted, climate change would still not be treated seriously in the US and that has the possibility — the likelihood, even — of being an extinction-level event. This is the prime issue which absolutely swamps every other concern (or should).

The same large companies would still have the same power they have now. Abortion restrictions would still occur. No systemic changes would be made in any real way.

Voting is an appeasement process to make you think that you matter.

You don’t.

I’ve been thinking tonight about my disagreements with modern liberalism and with identity politics.

Lately, it’s hard to un-conflate those two as they’ve essentially merged — a great mistake, I think.

More and more I’ve been leaning towards a more Marxian analysis and practice of liberalism which of course eschews identity politics by nature.  Identity politics and its inherent focus on the individual and their feelings is implicitly an extension of neoliberalism and in fact extremely compatible with all of the goals and end-states of this worldview.

Which is why I generally want nothing to do with it.

Take transgender rights for instance. Before anyone goes wacko, I’m a full supporter of transgender rights and the ability to define one’s gender. Absolutely a full believer in this. Enough said.

But as identity politics goes further down its Sarlacc hole, I question the wisdom of entire activist communities concentrating so many resources, words and effort on 0.3% of the population.

It’s not that they’re not important. They are. But in times or ridiculous and rising inequality, the near-complete triumph of neoliberalism and the oppression of the everyday worker, the concentration on transgenderism is like fighting a battle against a tadpole while an electric eel shocks you and all your friends to death.

Identity politics is nearly perfectly-designed to further the triumph and complete dominance of neoliberalism.

Its concentration on atomistic individualism and feelings over data and results; its focus on non-systemic causes and problems; its descriptions of issues as solely relating to personal flaws in oppressors — all of these sound like they’d been written up by the Koch brothers for squelching real protest or revolution.

I’m still thinking about all this. But I’d rather fight battles worth fighting.

You can continue striking a death blow against the tadpole if you want.

But I’ve got bigger fish that I don’t want to fry me.

Politically, the ACA’s  Individual Mandate is one of the stupidest domestic actions I’ve seen any modern president back and sign into law.

I understand “why” and all that but it is such a ridiculous idea if you think about it.

The ACA is such a piece of crap.

I saw the most American thing I’ve seen in a while the other day at work.

Or rather, outside of work.

I noticed that all of the earthworms had crawled out of the grass and died. Maybe not all of them — I didn’t dig through the soil to see if any remained — but certainly a huge number. Hundreds lay dead on the sidewalk, and not due to rain.

And then I remembered a few days earlier that the lawn crew had been treating the grass nearby, probably with some sort of insecticide or worse.

Now instead of having healthy dirt with earthworms and other desirable creatures, it was most likely a completely sterile wasteland that absent further constant chemical onslaughts would probably quickly deteriorate.

Congratulations, I thought — you’ve gone from a fairly self-sustaining system to one that is fragile and requires constant maintenance, especially since most if not all of the beneficial microbes are probably now dead too. Perhaps fruitful for the bottom line of the lawn service company, but even homeowners who benefit not at all from such ecological destruction still do the very same thing.

So very American — the utter destruction of something to “improve” it, which then necessitates making the environment even worse to “perfect” it in some carnival of artifice and perpetual maintenance to uphold the simulacrum that left alone would be much more pleasing and healthy.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign logo might not be the worst one ever, but it is absolutely terrible.

I think she hired the designers of Windows 8, or AOL ca. 1996.

I can’t complain too much because I never paid a cent for it, but the classic Wunderground site I’ve been using since the 1990s is closing down soon.

The new site is so inferior that it seems to have been designed by drugged-out camels. It shows far less information, in a far worse format with more clicks required to see the same data.

It is nearly completely unusable, like so much of modern design.

I assume modern design works better for low-IQ people, but not really sure.

That site is probably the one I’ve used the longest. I started checking it when I was still in the army back in the mid-90s.

Modern design just destroys so much.

No way I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. What, it’d effectively be George W. Bush’s fifth term?

And I won’t be voting for Rand Paul or any other Republican clown.

Guess I’ll also sit out the 2016 election.

I’d vote for Monica Lewinsky, though.

I don’t think not having a Facebook account makes me better, smarter or more awesome than anyone else. Nor do I think it makes me cooler or more authentic.

Sometimes I actually wish I could tolerate experiences like Facebook and other similar social milieus — extending this tolerance into the real-world to parties and get-togethers as well.

But I just can’t. It’s not a choice. More like an allergic reaction.

You know that feeling you get when you put something really bitter and foul in your mouth? And you try to swallow it but you just can’t and you start to retch involuntarily?

That’s what Facebook and all similar social aggregators and nexuses feel like to me. I try but just can’t choke it down.

It’s a handicap, truly. Humans are social creatures. I seem to want the benefits of social interaction without any of the unpleasant work involved. And to me it is painful, agonizing toil not involving a moment of pleasure.

I was never social, and I probably was made less social by extensive bullying. I learned early to utterly distrust adults and peers.

Hard lessons, but much of it was just my nature anyway.

I want more friends but have much trouble enduring the necessary moil of making that happen.

When times change, many — perhaps most — people forget that it ever used to be any different. But some people recall, not allowing novelty and wishful thinking to erase the former shape of the world.

I remember the 70s, albeit from a child’s perspective.  They were very different from today. My overwhelming impression is that people were more relaxed and having a lot more fun. They were also far more open.

I remember most of the 80s. The climate was very similar to this recounting of the 70s. I saw and experienced things then that almost never happen now, some of which would seem so unusual now as to be criminal. But then, they were just normal.

This will probably not be as strong a post as it could be because citing examples only sidetracks people as they get lost in concrete specificity and miss the point. Seems a common cognitive flaw. But when the times changed, it was very noticeable to me as it happened fairly quickly.

I don’t know precisely what brought it about. Like most complex shifts, probably a combination of many factors interacting and reinforcing — the continuing backlash against the counter-cultural movement, AIDS, and the rise of the Religious Right. And many other things.

That times change is not that surprising. That so many people are so quick to tell you that no, they’ve never been any other way, is what fascinates me.

Why this reaction? What are they trying to protect, or prevent?

I probably won’t write any more about losing weight. It just makes people angry and doesn’t help anyone. More importantly, I am getting bored with it.

I did it and that’s what matters to me. It is possible and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.

I don’t know why obesity rates have exploded. Probably there is no one answer. Though I understand the heritability of obesity, that doesn’t completely explain why there were few obese people even when processed food was already widely available.  Etc.

Lord I am already getting bored.

So no more weight loss talk around here. I lost weight; if you want to and are as stubborn as I am, you probably can too.

So that’s that.