Day: August 2, 2020

And the winner, predictably, is Trump.

In 2015-16, I was a huge Hillary person and I even wore a Hillary badge the size of a large dinner plate. Long-time readers saw a picture of the badge and know it’s true.

When Trump won, I was very upset. I didn’t cry because I’m no longer capable of crying anywhere except the cemetery but it was as close as I get to it.

I was upset because everybody I knew and every news source I accessed told me he was going to betray Ukraine, give Putin everything he wants, crash the economy, start wars, and collapse the US dollar. I didn’t want any of this so I was upset.

I have this extremely unusual quality, though, which is that I am incapable of getting emotionally invested in a politician, whether positively or negatively. (Anybody who comes in with the Hitler fallacy at this point gets banned for being a total idiot).

To me, a politician is a function. I don’t relate to them as human beings because I don’t know them as human beings. I perceive people who read Michelle Obama’s biography (or one written by any relative of somebody important) as aliens. I understand reading Barack Obama’s books. By virtue of being a US president, he was a figure of enormous public importance. But how is his wife more interesting than, I don’t know, my husband’s wife or your nephew’s brother-in-law?

Very soon into Trump’s presidency, the US dollar left its 8-year-long stagnation (I’m very sensitive to currency fluctuations because I have family and pay for services in Canada). My students started refusing low-paid campus jobs because they already had better-paying ones. My financial situation improved. Ukraine got everything from Trump in 3 months that it couldn’t get from Obama in 2 years. Putin got punished like the little bastard he is. No wars were started. Unemployment plummeted.

With the extraordinary degree of animosity Trump provokes, I’m guessing if there was something against him, we’d hear it. But for 5 years, there’s been nothing but hoaxes and lies. The “grab ’em by the pussy” hoax with the part “and they let you” consistently edited out and the outlandish “he confessed to sexual assault on tape” repeated like a mantra. The “he mocked a disabled reporter” hoax, the Russia hoax, the Ukraine hoax, the fish tank cleaner hoax – there’s no end in sight.

So yeah, since I have a functioning brain AND absolutely no Daddy issues whatsoever (I’m a Mommy issues person), I changed my mind from “he’s a unique threat to democracy” to “his biggest observable problem is that he’s a people-pleaser.” He says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear, and it has zero connection to reality.

In reality – and not in rhetoric or “tweets,” God, I’ve so had it with the “ah, look what he tweeted, democracy is in peril” crowd – he’s a lot less of a nationalist than I’d like. He’s got a kick-ass economic team that is to Obama’s what your intellect is to a snail’s. (For the particularly gifted among us, I’m not comparing Obama’s intellect and Trump’s. I’m comparing their economic teams. In personal intellect and oratory Obama is light-years ahead. Which did nothing to stop him from bombing out a bunch of countries, mishandling the economy, or wasting every opportunity to do a criminal justice reform. Or to do anything, really).

I wish we had somebody better than Trump. It should be so easy, right? Somebody smarter, less self-involved, with a stronger personality and a coherent worldview, somebody more loyal, somebody who doesn’t tweet even. And, of course, the important stuff: no wars, withdrawing troops, fracking (the only thing that really hurts Putin), economic protectionism, not exploiting Central America for serf labor, everything DeVos is doing in education (she’s been amazing, and I say it as somebody who hated her with the power of an exploding sun), resistance to the PC culture, supporting Ukraine.

Show me somebody like this, and I’ll go vote.

P.S. I want to thank reader methylethyl for coming up with such a great blogging topic. These posts have been massively popular, giving rise to comments that are often better than the actual posts.

We have coronavirus vaccines already. We already know it is safe enough to test in 30k people. Thousands are dying. So, after thinking lately, I agree w/@StevenSalzberg1—people deserve early access if they choose. Continue Phase 3 trials, but allow for compassionate use. #covid19

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1289892233613778947?s=19

Would you take this vaccine? And please note, I’m saying this vaccine nota well-tested one 3 years from now.

Would you protest if taking it becomes a condition to rejoin normal life (going back to work, traveling, putting kids in school, etc)?

Left-leaning people are total tools. First, they invented a completely insane story about teenagers on TikTok somehow dissuading Trump supporters from showing up at the Tulsa rally. As usual, the explanation not rooted in magical thinking (people are scared of big gatherings and travel during a pandemic) was rejected outright.

They repeated the story so many times that they actually believed it. When Trump suggested that TikTok – one of the most shameless representatives of surveillance capitalism and simultaneously one of the worst mainstream spreaders of child pornography – should be banned in the US, instead of saying “Hallelujah!” these poor individuals triumphantly rolled out the idea that Trump wanted to take revenge on those imaginary teenagers from the previous fairy tale by… banning one of fifty million apps they can rot their brains with.

Leaving these fairy tales aside, what can possibly motivate anybody over the age of 14 and / or an IQ over 90 to be upset over the end of TikTok if not severe Trump Derangement Syndrome? Compared to the amount of information Tiktok extracts from the idiot children who use it, Facebook is an innocent little getup. A bunch of nasty m-fuckers are getting filthy rich by exploiting your children in various ways including sexually. And all you see in the story is an opportunity to mention that you don’t like Trump? Because we all haven’t heard you mention it before?

Well, rejoice then. It won’t be banned. You’ll keep getting exploited. Go celebrate.

More than a million Germans have come out to protest against COVID tyranny.

What happened to Americans that they are razing their cities to protest fake oppressions but meekly accept real ones?

I’m reading accounts of how reasonably and non-hysterically people respond to COVID in Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and other normal places and I want to weep. And here we have turned into a bunch of cowering, weepy hysterics with no end in sight. I always hated the liberals’ worship of Northern Europe but now I wish they remembered how much they used to be “like Norway.”

This completely jives with my anecdotal experience:

The most unhinged BLMers are all women. Somebody needs to study the psycho-sexual nature of female attachment to totalitarian regimes.

So let’s start with our poll runner-up, marriage.

I always thought marriage wasn’t for me. Everybody always said – and if you start tracking it, you’ll see that people do it about twice a day – that passion only lasts for 3-6 months in a marriage, after which it becomes about… I don’t know what, I always stop listening after that part.

You can move countries or even continents but still people will keep drumming on this idea like a bunch of starving woodpeckers. And they also give the same numbers, three to six. After hearing everybody in sight proclaim this searing piece of wisdom in every language I knew, I believed it. And it freaked me out.

I like passion. I like being in love. I like butterflies. I love the feeling of getting a text message and thinking, “Is it from HIM?” I like having a HIM. I like talking until early hours because there’s so much to say. I like having to make an effort not to bore everybody by talking about THE GUY. I thought, well, maybe at 75 I won’t care anymore about any of this stuff and want a male roommate.

N and I got married because we had a complicated legal situation and didn’t want to be separated. We were both terrified. I thought marriage meant no butterflies, and N thought it meant we’d start trying to carve each other up with meat cleavers because that was his received message about marriage. We’ve all got our own burdens.

But hey, ten years in and butterflies are still very much here while meat cleavers never materialized. We joke about “hey, the passion is definitely going to die any day now. Or at least by our 50th anniversary.”

Which doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. A marriage is a lifelong exercise in patience, humility, tolerance, and growth. It’s very hard and some times are a lot harder than others. I love it, though, because it’s so interesting. Being able to know another human being on such a deep level and still realize that you are only maybe half an inch deep is a very intense experience.

The secret to making it work is to decide that this is it, this is the person you got, this isn’t Walmart, and you can’t return him (or her, obviously) and get a better version. (And before anybody chimes in with “But what if he turns out to be a bastard,” definitely get treatment for the crazy that attracts you to bastards. Do that before you get a goldfish into your life, let alone a human being.)

It shouldn’t be that hard. We all have a list of people that are in our lives for good. These are the people we won’t drop no matter what happens. And it’s an enormously liberating feeling to say, ok, that’s it, I’m done choosing.

It also really improves the quality of life. The thought of, “this person is with me for the rest of our lives. One of us will bury the other” is very conducive to a feeling of great inner peace. Yes, he did something excruciatingly obnoxious but against the background of a whole life together, who cares? The other side of accepting is being accepted. We, human beings, are all annoying as fuck and having somebody know every shade of how annoying we are and still loving us is big.

The title of the post is “how I changed.” Nothing can be further from my mind than to change anybody else’s. Everybody has their own journey, and it’s all good. Some are very happy married, while others are very happy single. Only miserable people need everybody around them to mimic their life path. I’m most certainly not one of such sad creatures.