History blindness.

 There are people who lack a sense of history. I'm not even talking about a lack of education: somebody who only watches TV can still grasp that there was a time before TV when people had to watch plays instead. I'm talking about people who don't seem to grasp that an era ended before a different era began.

Here are examples that I have observed from just talking to people. These are adults who are at least mentally sound enough to have gainful employment, and did not seem at all sarcastic when they said what they said.

1. I joked to a coworker that a different coworker was so old that she had a Confederate birth certificate. He looked at me and said "Really?" as if I was telling him a weird fact instead of a joke. A high school graduate should know when the Civil War happened and the limits of a human lifespan.

2. I was chatting with a coworker who was a Vietnam veteran. He told that he shook hands with a general and got rifle grease on his hands, and the general just laughed it off. I asked him if it was General Westmoreland. The vet confirmed that it was Westmoreland. Another coworker overhears this, looks at me, and asks "How old are you?" with a confused look on his face.

3. At a party, I was talking about a place that I used to work at. At that location, uranium was rolled into bars for the Manhattan Project, and workers had no idea that these bars were being used to develop the first atomic bombs. A woman asked "But you didn't have anything to do with that, right?"

4. A friend of mine was telling me about a guy in her gaming group. She said that he was in his 50's and had served in World War 2. This is especially egregious because I met her grandfather who raised her and had actually served in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruthlessness doesn't work

 So I see a lot of posts on Threads where MAGAhadeen are celebrating the destruction of boats. A couple thoughts. 

1. The war on drugs is an expensive mistake. If you actually care about saving addicts from themselves, focus on treatment and harm reduction, not incarceration.

2. Sinking a boat is only justified if that boat shoots at our people. Boats that try to run can be incapacitated by shooting the engine.

3. The only way to tell if a boat is a drug boat or a fishing boat is to board and inspect it. Because any commercially produced boat can carry both drugs and fishing gear. If you think a boat has illegal goods, you can signal it to stop, shoot the engine if it tries to run, arrest the crew, and seize the boat and its cargo.

4. Ruthlessness is a bad strategy in general. Imagine if a future Democratic president issued an executive order that required police to shoot anyone flying a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika. Most of these people cheering for exploding boats might squawk at the idea of 21st century Nazis being shot in the street. Because they already know where that slippery slope is headed: if I say that all fascists should be shot and I get to decide who is a fascist, then I can just say that anyone who says negative things about me is a fascist.

There are real world examples that prove my point. Germans who surrendered to the Soviets could expect to be sent to a gulag and possibly freeze or starve to death. Germans who surrendered to Americans could expect to sent to a camp in the US and get fed and even take correspondence courses for credit with German universities. So of course they fought hardest against the Red Army, and that's a huge reason why the USSR suffered more military casualties than all of the Axis powers combined. So even when you are fighting the most evil regime in history, it still pays to show compassion to men who can't fight back anymore.

My theory on Trump's endgame

One of the most famous line from Game of Thrones is "Tell Cersei I want her to know it was me."

If you haven't watched the show, Lady Olenna knows she's going to die anyway, so she admits to killing King Joffery, the least popular character on the show. This is relevant, because there are things that people do that they have to keep a secret, but still really want to brag about. They want for a time that is right, even if they have to wait for their deathbed.

My theory is that not only is Donald Trump a pedophile, he is proud of it and want to tell everyone about it.

Remember the 80's and 90's? Donald Trump used to. Back then, if you were gay, you often had to hide it, depending on where you live and the people around you. There were states where two men having sex could be charged with sodomy if they got caught. As a straight person, I would speak out against this injustice and people would accuse me of being gay. Other straight people probably felt the same way, but they didn't speak out because they feared risking their reputations and livelihoods. 

One argument against LGBTQ acceptance was that it would lead to a slippery slope: if gay people were accepted by society, why not accept adults who molest kids? Today, most of us believe that what consenting adult do is their own business, but children cannot consent to sexual acts.

But if a pedophile doesn't view his actions as wrong, then he might hope that his lifestyle might gain mainstream acceptance. He might test to see how other people feel about it by dropping hints. For example, he might talk about pardoning another pedophile, like Ghislaine Maxwell, and seeing how people would react to that.

And if people still don't like it, what could they do about it? Donald Trump could take a gun and sex with a little girl on Fifth Avenue and there is nothing we could about it besides impeach him again. Still, we should impeach him again.

When that fascist got fired

 Recently a fascist got fired for something he said on YouTube. I don't want to look up his name, and I don't want to make him even more famous.

Fascism is an ideology for losers. Julius Caesar standardized the calendar. Napoleon spread the metric system throughout Europe. All Hitler and Mussolini did was start and lose a world war.

But unemployment is a common problem for extremists on both the left and the right: employers prefer to hire moderates. It's challenging enough to get Democrats and Republicans to get along at work. Unless you are independently wealthy, maybe you aren't in a position to tell the world what to do.

We should be allowed to talk about suicide on social media

 First of all, I am fine and thank you for asking. I almost died from natural causes this year. Doctors and nurses put in a lot of time and effort to keep me alive, and my family and my insurance company spent more than six figures on my surgery and rehabilitation. I like being alive, like most people.

Suicide is a taboo topic on social media, to the extent that filters are employed that flag people who even use the word "suicide" in a post. On the one hand, this can deter people from advocating suicide, which is still a problem online. On the other hand, it stops people from seeking help, and it stops people from discussing how certain historical figures died.

The real motivation for these social media filters is that the topic of suicide makes people uncomfortable. If you are the type to use social media to share cat photos and pictures of your lunch while on vacation, then maybe Facebook should provide an option where such content is filtered out. But there are people out there who are hurting, and social media can be a resource where they can connect with people who know them and care about them. Maybe they don't feel comfortable calling 988 and talking to strangers. The algorithm should never stand in the way of people getting help.

Trump just likes violence.

I don’t fault Donald Trump for dodging the draft. That was a particularly foolish war, and nobody was morally obligated to participate. For that matter, I was 22 when 9/11 happened. I never bothered to visit a recruiting station either. I have respect for those who served, I just didn’t make that choice myself. Most Americans don’t. You don’t have to justify it by saying you would have lost control and punched the drill instructor.

But eventually men reach an age where they might dwell on the path not taken. War is like the hot crazy woman that we never worked up the courage to ask out. As if we could have changed her. Recently Trump has reconnected with her online. She sure changed a lot over the years, but she hasn’t exactly improved. He’s way too old to meet her in person, so he just flirts with her via DM’s and sends her gifts.

Trump loves violence like the Pope loves Jesus, but he’s just not a commitment kind of guy. Usually, state governors are more than content to handle civil unrest without federal aid, but Trump REALLY wants to stick his stubby fingers in LA. I can’t even imagine that he thinks this would help him politically; even if SCOTUS lets him run again, he has no shot at California’s electoral votes.

I will go as far to say that he likes being on the receiving end. (Don’t give him what he wants. I oppose the death penalty by both all levels of government and non-state actors.) Remember when he was almost shot in the head in Pennsylvania last year? That could have been avoided in a couple of ways. He could have not run for President, or he could have insisted on an indoor venue that would have been easier to secure. Presidents and presidential candidates should not hold outdoor rallies for the same reason they stopped riding in convertibles. I want Trump to live long enough to stand trial and serve out the sentence, but his choices do make me worried for his safety.

To all folks in LA, protesting is great but violence is not. Having said that, I feel that all law enforcement should wear clearly identifiable uniforms when making an arrest, have their faces visible or at least wear photo ID badges, and drive marked vehicles when making a traffic stop. There might be a murder case in the near future where the defendant will say that he didn’t know the victim was a cop and the jury just might believe him.

That time Trump got shot in Pennsylvania.

 Let's get a couple things out of the way. I have never voted for Donald Trump, and I never plan to. I oppose all political violence, whether it is against Trump or caused by Trump. Those are my opinions, and I know that not everyone reading this agrees with them. We live in an era where cold hard facts are treated like opinions. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks shot Trump with a rifle before being killed by the Secret Service. The FBI and the Secret Service agree on that, and yet people think I'm an idiot for believing them.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed that Biden was trying to have Trump killed. They seemed to have stopped saying this now that Trump is President and presumably has access to all the relevant files. 

Left-wing conspiracy theorists claim that Trump staged the whole thing. There is a picture of the bullet passing by Trump's head. Whatever else you or I think about Trump, I do think that he likes being alive and would NOT attend the rally if he knew his supporters were going to stage a shootout with live ammunition just to help him win Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes.

One common argument is that an AR-15 round would have obliterated Trump's ear. This thinking is likely the result of a generation raised on first person shooter games where every shot that even touches a character's head results in a kill. Real life is a bit more complicated and unpredictable. The bullet grazed Trump's ear: it rubbed against the skin and removed enough tissue to cause the ear to bleed.

"How did his ear heal so fast?" It may have had stitches or it may have been cauterized for all I know. His hair and his hat tend to block the view of any possible scar tissue. I'm not a doctor and neither are most people reading this. Trump could provide us with answers by releasing his medical records. But why would he do that? We're wasting all this energy and bandwidth arguing about it, so it's smart of him to let us bicker.

It's understandable that people might have lots and lots of questions about an incident like this. But we can apply Occam's Razor here and come up with the simplest explanation: one lone nutjob tried to kill a Presidential candidate. It's always one lone nutjob, because normal people tend to like being alive and dislike killing. Normal people also talk too much to be an effective part of a conspiracy.

I do think that the Secret Service should have removed Trump from the stage as soon as Crooks was detected. That is an easy thing to say in hindsight, but the Secret Service tries very hard to avoid the appearance of interfering with presidential politics. Removing Trump from the stage before Crooks had the chance to fire off a shot might have been construed as trying to cause Trump to lose the election.

I also think that Presidents and candidates should avoid having rallies at open air venues. But I'm a safety first kind of guy.