My wife made me get another Facebook account.

Some more thoughts about getting banned and getting back on.

I think I tripped an algorithm and got banned. The very last thing I posted with my old account was a poor taste joke about Dale Gribble from King Of The Hill getting shot by the Oregon State Police alongside Lavoy Finicum. Maybe typing "Lavoy Finicum" set up a red flag to the ban bots. Maybe I was targeted by malicious reporters.

Maybe I shouldn't have spend so much time at shitposting pages. I'm not going to pretend that this is entirely not my fault. But sticking to safe topics is boring. If I wanted to do that, I'd just watch network TV.

Of course I had to alert key friends that I was banned from FB. So I tweeted about it. Of course shady people reached out to me offering to restore my account for a fee. I refuse to believe that this would work, and I refuse to pay in any case. Facebook promised that the site would be forever free to users, so I'm holding them to that.

I got banned from Facebook.

 So it looks like I'm permanently banned from Facebook. It didn't tell me which post broke which rule, but they won't review it, so that's that. Either it will get fixed or it won't. My account was likely collateral damage in a war between a corporation trying to produce a sanitized product for suburbanites and racist bigots who still think that Trump is president.

Meanwhile, good ol' Blogger has been there for me since 2005. So you can find me here if you care to look. 

For your own sake, stop calling yourself MAGA

 People should stop calling themselves “MAGA”. I’m not asking you to give up Christianity, conservatism, or the Republican Party. I’m asking you to drop the MAGA handle. You weren’t born or raised MAGA. It was just a fad that started 7 years ago, and you are free to leave it behind.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” implies that America is not currently great, but it used to be. The goal seems to be to change America back to that bygone era of greatness. 

To imply that America used to be great could be considered insulting. Imagine you are traveling in another country, and someone walks up to you and says in fluent English, “Hey, you’re an American right? Man, your country used to be pretty great.”

Consider that if you have ideas that would improve the country, insulting the country as a whole is probably the wrong way to go about having them implemented. You can insult the President or any individual you like, but insulting the country itself won’t get you very far. Ever see a picture or a video of someone burning the flag? Did you care what they had to say next after that? 

What makes the past better than the present? Was it the economy? Back when a man could buy a house and support his whole family on factory wages by himself, because unions were stronger back then? Except MAGA doesn’t seem keen on unions. MAGA does pay lip service to grievances about taxation and inflation. But that was the Tea Party’s focus. MAGA absorbed the Tea Party and expanded its scope. MAGA is really about culture. Many people my age want the culture that we were raised with. But the biggest cultural changes of the 21st century have been due to the Internet. We can use it to connect to people who share the same interests, beliefs, and values. We also become very aware of people with contrary viewpoints. 

There are people in rural areas who did not have high speed internet until recently. They are experiencing a huge culture shock; like showing George Washington a train or Abraham Lincoln an automobile.

There have always been gay people and trans folk. We’re just more aware of them now than we were when we got our information from three TV networks and the morning paper.

There have always been people of other races. We are seeing them star in more movies and TV shows. You can watch these shows if you like. If you don’t want to watch the new stuff, there are decades of older stuff that you might be more comfortable with.

Cancel culture has always been around. When people don’t watch a TV show, it goes away. When an actor acts like a jerk, it typically (but not always) tends to wreck his career because people don’t want to see his movies anymore (or at least until he redeems himself in someway).

Common courtesy is changing. It’s now common to hear words like “fuck” and “shit” while in public. We hear them so much that they have lost all meaning. A child who says “fuck that shit” doesn’t intend to have intercourse with excrement; he just doesn’t know what the words mean. If you use words like “n*****” or “f*****”, that can end a career if the wrong people hear them. We’ve always known to watch our language, it’s just now the vocabulary of vulgarity has changed.

Pronouns aren’t hard. When you are talking to a person, as I am talking to you right now, the proper pronoun is “you”. When you are talking about a person, “they” and “them” is fine if you don’t know what their gender is. If they want you to know what they want you to use, they’ll let you know. If you don’t know them well enough to know what they want to be called, that’s fine. But if you don’t care enough about them to find out, why continue to talk about people that you don’t care about?

When you call yourself MAGA, you offend two very large groups of people: 1. Americans who think America is currently great, 2. Americans who would have experienced discrimination in the past that you are nostalgic for. You can certainly continue to be white and Christian, as every US president has been one or both of those. But you should consider refraining from calling yourself MAGA. You can be the same person you always were, but just choose a different label.

The culture war is a sham.

 You can fight for freedom. You can fight for truth, justice, and your way of life. You can fight for your home. But culture in and of itself isn't something you can preserve. A nation's cultures are constantly being shaped by internal and external influences. Every generation tends to enjoy a form of music that past generations find appalling. Millennials like whiney breakup songs, which Gen X likes to mock. Gen X likes grunge and rap which boomers hate. Boomers like rock and roll, which made the Greatest Generation's hair go grey. The Greatest Generation loved jazz, which the Lost Generation loathed. And so on. I imagine the first prehistoric human to grunt with a rhythm probably shocked the elders of his tribe.

Culture is a foolish thing to fight a war over, because culture is impacted by war. Soldiers never come back home to the America that they left. World War I took German language out of everyday American life, and a lot of Americans even changed their last names. World War II made us give equality for women and black people a closer look. Vietnam gave us hippies and Middle-Eastern wars gave us nationalist country music ballads.

Technology impacts culture as well. You are likely reading this on a device that is less than 5 years old. You're already thinking about getting something newer. We communicate with images, videos, and memes. We stay in touch with friends that we haven't seen in years, if we ever met them in the first place.

In light of all that, if your sole goal is to preserve your language and culture, then perhaps you should form a pacifistic, luddite society like the Amish.. But if you prefer to stay connected with a world that continues to evolve and grow, then expect changes that you just aren't going to like.

The liberty movement and Ukraine.

 The liberty movement is like Ukraine. It's a group of feisty people surrounded by Team Red to the right and Team Blue to the left. In an ideal, perfect world, they could go their own way and maintain their own identity. They have a shared past and heritage with Team Red, and many of them self-identify as Team Red. But Team Red's recent hostile actions cannot be ignored. In order to stay alive in the long run, Ukraine and the liberty movement must join Team Blue.

Biden's new vaccine mandate.

 Not every thing the government does is good, and not everything it does is bad. I see the vaccine mandate as a mixed bag. Biden was reluctant to push for this; even some progressives are concerned about the government's growing footprint now.

Biden wants you to get vaccinated. He wants the pandemic to end during his first term in office. Biden doesn't really want to force you to do it, because he needs to keep his approval ratings up if he wants to get re-elected.

Your boss wants you to get vaccinated. He wants you to not get sick and not make your coworkers sick. Your boss wouldn't mind forcing you to get vaccinated, but he doesn't want to get sued and he doesn't want you to collect unemployment if he has to fire you.

So the Biden Administration and Corporate America came up with a plan. The mandate will "make" companies do what they want to do anyway: fire people for not getting vaccinated. But with the mandate in place, terminated workers will not have any legal recourse. When you try to fight the Man, the Man always wins.

People like to ask "Why does the vaccine have to be political?" Anytime the government is involved, it's political. Many Trump supporters are upset that Trump isn't getting credit for Operation Warp Speed. They want to boycott the vaccine out of sheer spite.

But if you care about politics, you need to realize that COVID-19 has a fatality rate that is greater than 1%. Elections are often decided by less than 1 percentage point. So let's you have a district with 100,000 Democratic voters and 100,000 Republican voters. All the Democrats get vaccinated. Let's say half the Republicans get vaccinated. Let's say 10% of those unvaccinated Republicans get sick. So that 5000 patients. One percent of them die. So now this district has 100,000 Democrats and 99,950 Republicans. Now, that might not sound like much of an advantage, especially since Democrats tend to have a lower turnout rate. But spread that across 435 Congressional Districts, and the GOP is going to struggle to take back the House.

So next year, when Democrats increase their control of Congress and become able to pass any laws they want, are you going to blame Biden for tricking you out of getting vaccinated?

Why Trump lost in 2020

 I'll try to explain in the simplest terms that I can. Trump might have won if it weren't for the pandemic; voters have been routinely re-electing Presidents since 1996. I can see how his supporters might be frustrated and disappointed by the outcome. Personally, I've been frustrated and disappointed by election outcomes my whole life. But it's important to understand why these things happen.

1. There was a recession economy in 2020. Whether it is right or wrong, voters often place blame for a poor economy on the President. This sort of thing caused Herbert Hoover to lose re-election in 1932 and Bush 41 to lose in 1992. To be sure, the recession was caused by the pandemic.

2. Trump's response to the pandemic was bad. He had federal agents seize medical supplies from hospitals. He visited patients in hospitals without wearing a mask. He kept holding public rallies in spite of the danger, and ended up getting sick himself. That showed poor judgement.

3. There are more liberal and progressive voters in the US than there are conservative voters. While a typical conservative is more reliable and more likely to show up for every election, higher turnout means more liberal voters are at the polls than conservatives. Higher turnout helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. There was record turnout in 2020 due to emotional charged events and state election officials working hard to allow voters to participate safely.