That’s…actually kinda sweet.
Day: August 26, 2024, 5:29 PM
Polar Sower
It’s cool to watch your power bill go down because you’re sending juice back into the grid and the power company is paying you for that.
Response
At the time, I thought shooting all the people who invaded the Capitol Building on January 6 was the correct response1. In prior times, it’s what would’ve been done to a hostile force attempting to violently take over the most important government building in the country. That level of fierce response would’ve been justified and unquestionably correct2.
But I was wrong about that. Allowing the mob to beclown themselves as they did was far better. There wasn’t a martyrdom event, therefore. They just looked like fools and dimwits, dressed in doofy clothes, stealing laptops and putting their feet up on desks. My way, though the “correct” response, would’ve been hugely counterproductive to the republic as a whole. The Jan. 6 rioters lost vastly more support with how stupid they looked and that was probably worth allowing them all not to get peppered with rounds from MP5s.
So I was wrong. It does happen, though not often. And I admit it when I am.
Terra Vestigo
I don’t feel that Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series was very successful, yet I think about it all the time. Not sure what that means but perhaps I should re-evaluate.
In the right hands, though, I posit that it could make a crackin’ good TV show.
Ready Steady
Trump supporters focus on regaining power—no matter how Americans vote.
Gettin’ ready to do the coup. I hope there are others preparing for the necessary counter-coup. This one will be far more organized than the January 6 effort was; no horned trailer park shamans and brain-damaged mobs.
All Rise
The best lines from Evil Dead Rise are these:
Kassie: You’d be a good mom someday, Auntie Beth.
Beth: Oh yeah?
Kassie: Yeah. You know how to lie to kids.
Dang that hits hard.
Hopeless
I’m still angry about the $50 I donated to the Obama campaign in 2008. What a waste of money. It would’ve been better to set that money on fire. Yes, I know it was only $501. But the symbolism matters given how terrible a president Obama ended up being.
The Success of Messaging at the DNC. Democrats are hitting all the notes that have eluded them. It’s strange having an actually organized party. Hasn’t happened since the 1990s.
China’s Export Strategy Causes Global Market Havoc.
Taiwan jails spies ‘seduced by money’ to work for China.
Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.
One year after Prigozhin’s death, the Kremlin is humiliated once more.
How Democrats snatched ‘freedom’ back from Trump and the Republicans.
I switched to a flip phone and dramatically improved my well-being.
Zelensky’s Invasion of Russia Sends a Message to Moscow—and Washington. Ukraine’s audacious move across the border is an effort to show the world that the country is still in the fight. Well, yes, as that was the purpose of the attack after all.
I worked at Google for almost a decade. Its problem is bureaucracy — not hybrid working.
The thinker, as he sits in his study drawing his plans for the direction of society, will do no thinking if his breakfast has not been produced for him by a social process which is beyond his detailed comprehension. He knows that his breakfast depends upon workers on the coffee plantations of Brazil, the citrus groves of Florida, the sugar fields of Cuba, the wheat farms of the Dakotas, the dairies of New York; that it has been assembled by ships, railroads, and trucks, has been cooked with coal from Pennsylvania in utensils made of aluminum, china, steel, and glass. But the intricacy of one breakfast, if every process that brought it to the table had deliberately to be planned, would be beyond the understanding of any mind. Only because he can count upon an infinitely complex system of working routines can a man eat his breakfast and then think about a new social order.
Walter Lippmann, The Good Society (1937)
Jane Says (Wrong Stuff)
I think Jane is nearly-totally wrong here. Below, I’ll explain way.
She’s right about one thing: the 1990s was not the pinnacle of human civilization. However, particularly if you were straight, the 1990s was a pretty great time to be alive no matter your circumstances as a child or adult. That’s because it saw the end of the Cold War and it was an era of (mostly) peace and, importantly, of tranquility after a long stint of dread and fear. The nuclear shadow we’d all been crouching under for forty years receded; it felt like we were far less likely to perish in a globe-spanning nuclear conflagration. Many people had been living with the inevitability of that since the 1950s. Jane is 36. Like Florrie, she’s too young to recall any of that, so she has absolutely no idea what that was like (and it really shows).
I remember talking on the playground with kids in the fourth grade about how we hoped we died quickly when we were nuked, as who would want to live after that? That’s not a normal thing for nine-year-olds to talk about, don’t you think? I wonder if Jane thinks kids of that age discuss such topics now. I am quite sure they do not. But it was common back in the 1980s.
Second, the 90s were a time of just great optimism and unbridled hopefulness. Yes, even for adults. It felt like we were on the way to solving all our problems, that some glorious future was just ahead of us, and that all of us were building it. The whole culture was just bursting with that notion. Hell, even the “pessimistic” stuff from that era seems almost comically optimistic now in retrospect.
Jane is wrong, but is both too young and too lacking in wisdom to understand why and how she is wrong. Sure, just plain nostalgia is a thing. And I don’t agree with J.D. Haltigan’s take, either. But it’s possible for two people to be wrong. And Jane is just an absolute bellend here in all ways someone could be one.