Friday, December 8, 2023

George Santos: Made in America

 In 48 hours, George Santos lined up more than his annual Congressional salary ($174K) by joining Cameo. (source)

America is a failure.

Think of all the lessons you were taught growing up about the "American Dream" and what it took to achieve it: honesty, perseverance, hard work, playing by the rules, being your best self, treating others the way you want to be treated. Virtually none of this turned out to be true.

Observe how some of the most honest, hardest working people are almost always broke... while top-to-bottom, total frauds like Santos and Trump lead lavish lives and fall back upon an endless supply of golden parachutes - furnished by a society obsessed with celebrity and transfixed by performative, outrageous behavior as the modus operandi.

People might be tempted to invoke retributive metaphysics like "karma" or "Judgement Day," but it's fairly obvious that these are just moral fantasies fed to the public to mollify their discontent and make them feel better about how often vice and avarice pay, while modesty and virtue yield only squalor, sweat, and hardship.

Saturday, December 17, 2022

The Best Grift, Believe Me

Isn't it obvious by now that:

Trump's entire effort to run for president (which he never intended to or planned on winning), serving as president (as the host of a taxpayer-funded reality TV show where outrage was the Gross Domestic Product), and now selling $100 NFTs (of himself Photoshopped as a superhero) to the people who have been complaining about gas prices and inflation the loudest

...is just to monetize anger from the most insecure, gullible, xenophobic, and/or ideologically desperate people?

Because I think it's obvious.




Friday, September 2, 2022

Dark Brandon Rises

MAGA told Sleepy Joe, "let's go, Brandon!" Then he evolved into Dark Brandon and racked up political wins all summer. Now MAGA is crying about nationwide losses at the ballot and being called "semi-fascist" by Dark Brandon. It's sure looking like a "Remember, Remember, the 8th of Roe-vember" election this fall.

If the Republican Party wasn't actively working to dismantle democracy, this would almost be entertaining.



Monday, June 27, 2022

Federalism Failures

It's amazing to me that conservatives so often fail to see medical privacy as a fundamental right which one has regardless of which state they happen to live in at the time.  Why should the people of Missouri, Connecticut, or anywhere else get to vote on whether a person can choose the reproductive healthcare that they determine with their doctor is best for them?

This "leave it up to the states" mantra is a failed federalism which leaves fundamental issues of bodily autonomy and individual liberty up to the whims of highly gerrymandered state legislatures. It didn't work for interracial marriage, it didn't work for segregated schools, it didn't work for sexual privacy, it didn't work for same sex marriage, and it won't work for medical privacy.

Saturday, November 13, 2021

Have You been to Facebook Jail for Justice?

I saw someone making bigoted and homophobic remarks about the first openly-gay U.S. governor, Jared Polis, on (of all things) a Facebook thread about Britney Spears finally getting her conservatorship ended.  After reading her hateful message to Gov. Polis about being married to another man, I told the person I wondered exactly how ugly of a human being she is and flagged her post for hateful speech. Facebook updated me by confirming her comment was hateful speech and removed it.



But Facebook also said I was harassing and bullying her by asking her this question and put me in Facebook Jail for 24 hours.


There was no appeals process or opportunity to respond before the deprivation commenced. This is a common experience for many of us on social media, likely many times each. And almost certainly because these decisions are made by algorithms who do not understand the moral context of the statement ("ugly human being"); likely instead recoding Facebook to combat worsening eating disorders and depression (especially related to recent internal research leaks about in teen girls on Instagram who struggle with self-image issues). So this kind of over-correction is the result.



Almost every one of these online policy decisions have a significant annual negative impact on commerce because many social media users also rely on these platforms for advertising and sales. And yet responses to such matters are almost all determined (along with sanctions imposed) by an automated process long before a person reviews the matter in question. Who wrote the Facebook Constitution, anyway? Why shouldn't there be a Social Media Bill of Rights to include sufficient due process from actual human beings employed by major online platforms?

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Time Traveling with Google Street View

 I accidentally discovered a wormhole while using Google Street View. This could be used to travel back in time to warn people about future events.