I guess I’ll keep writing posts like this until my fingers fall off.

Scalzi the pretend-Democrat like most pseudo-Dems doesn’t really understand what’s occurring now or why it is occurring. He’s lost politically and socioculturally. Old sureties have evaporated with no certain replacement; new alignments have begun. He’s clueless like most of the Republican-lite party.

Don’t intend my spiel to cover that, though.

This is what I keep going back to. Trump’s policies are constructing on the base firmly established by Obama, by George W. Bush, by Bill Clinton. Trump is not some departure from American history’s direction, he is just a malignant continuation and intensification.

I have nothing to say to and nothing in common with delusional Dems who did not recognize any need to resist Obama’s wars, his drone-murders, his de facto disdain for the left-behind of society. He was a believer in meritocracy, content to throw the poor and the downtrodden in the Toro chipper-shredder when it suited his aims (and it often did), who deported 2.4 million people from the country. And he was for the “Grand Bargain” to slash Social Security and Medicare just like Paul fucking Ryan.

If you weren’t resisting then, what’s got you out now besides, “Go, team, go?” Why is it just fine when a Democrat diminishes and disgraces our country but not ok when it’s Trump?

My face when I discovered that the bag I carry my laptop to work in is older than the intern I’m talking with:

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Her voice….

She looks 13 because she’s 13.

BTW she learned to play the guitar in a week to perform this song. A week. Her main instrument is ukulele. Huge talent imbalances are so unfair!

Never mind all that, let’s watch Miley kill it.

I haven’t said much about Trump. What is there to say, really? He’s about what I expected to get after America refused for four decades to deal with its problems.

While it isn’t exactly predictable in its particulars, the general outline is not something unexpected. “I told you so” doesn’t really help though it’s fun to say. As the nominal “left” party blamed all its difficulties on the real left and all true political choices melted away, America chose rightward soft fascism as the default.

Trump is just a continuation of existing trends, not some outré norm-breaker, and he is very much in line with most of American history.

We are getting a version of what could have happened during the 1930s, when for the most part better decisions (after much resistance then too) were made.

No, no, nitpickers, it’s not a repeat of the 1930s. But there are certain obvious resonances.

It was funny when I was 12 or 13 or so and adults telling me that books were “too old” for me that I’d read four or five years before.

That happened frequently.

Read Moby Dick when I was in third grade. That was one of the books that I recall.

I never minded being underestimated. It’s very useful, most of the time.

This is true, and applies to me too:

A lot of what folks are now referring to as resistance is really just basic civic engagement.

— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) January 27, 2017

Here’s why Firefox will die.

I use one of those extensions. More than half of the extensions I use (and all of the most important ones) will no longer work after Firefox 57 is released.

I plan to switch to Chrome then as it’s faster in most ways and has fewer strange issues. Most people will do the same since the reason most continue to use Firefox is because of the extensions model.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is bad idea traps and the inability to see them. It’s a multiscalar problem — it happens at every societal level as with the housing boom and crash of 2008 down to the relatively-minor issue of the Mozilla organization clearly determined to exterminate itself, but failing to understand how it’s now just baked in.

I find it interesting that as with army ants driven by pheromones circling until they die, humans and their organizations can do the same, despite the fact that to anyone standing outside it’s immediately obvious what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.

If you want to see some really excellent acoustic guitar playing, you should watch this.

Reminds me of Deb Talan’s playing.

Kevin Drum claims that NAFTA is not really a big deal.

Not really a big deal — unless your job was shipped off or you were forced to work for starvation-level wages.

And read all of this, but particularly the middle section about the effects of NAFTA on Mexican farmers.

Contrary to what you might believe from reading what I write here, I am for trade deals and open trade — but only in the rubric of full protection of worker’s rights, the environment (NAFTA also caused devastation here) and quite a lot of redistribution of the shared gains. Without this, all “free” trade does is to make some corporations and individual richer and impoverishes everyone else.

By the way, these treaties are designed to do this. It’s not some side effect.

Drum’s typical blithe dismissal of the fortunes of millions of Americans’ and Mexicans’ plights angers me to no end.

The problem — or at least the main one — with Drum’s “not really a big deal” is that he’s looking at a spreadsheet. Some numbers on a graph.

The real world does not give a fuck about a graph produced in some think tank from bogus data provided by an economist trained to cogitate exactly in the prescribed ways that guarantees his or her salary gets paid.

Don’t get me wrong — having real data is important. What Drum cites probably is not, most of the time. But the data doesn’t actually tell you in many cases what you need to know even if it is accurate. Drum seems to think that having some numbers is as good as knowing the truth, when the truth is a completely separate entity. (The liberal version of truthiness or “alternative facts” if you will is that the numbers work out, the math looks good.)

As I observed the other day, one in the chamber during Russian roulette. On average, I am alive. This is Kevin Drum’s spreadsheet reality. It is also completely beside the point.

Obama might have had good intentions. I don’t know. “Might have” doesn’t matter. Hell, good intentions in many cases don’t matter.

For years, people like me warned everyone about supposedly-innocuous Obama initiatives like strengthening the CFAA and how that would only cause harm.

But no. Obama is a cool cat, he’s alright. It’s all good.

Until it ain’t.

This is why it matters what an administration does, even if it’s “on your side.” Sides are meaningless in the context of politics. Actions matter, because those actions can be built on and abused by the next person or party in power.

Some Americans are about to learn a hard lesson. Unfortunately, not nearly all those learning the lesson will deserve it.

“Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.”

-Shoshana Zuboff

If the universe is completely deterministic as scientists insist (and it may well be), then causality doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. No “choice” means no causality. The concept just doesn’t work and can’t work with complete determinism assumed.

Leibniz in the 1700s was arguing essentially the same thing with his concept of monads.

Science and its religion of complete determinism only reinforces this, not refutes it, a trap sprung on itself.

One major problem with science as we conceive it is that it attempts to sweep problems like this under the rug and deny they exist, when in fact they are foundational problems.

She really is.