You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.
Jen found this article and read it aloud a couple of days ago, and it really struck home. In Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting, Julio Vincent Gambuto makes the case that this strange reality is the best opportunity we’ve ever had to stop, look, and evaluate our lives, our country, and our future, and prepare to make changes for the better right now before we are lulled back to sleep.
Interesting...
- October 18
Jen and I have been talking for years about how we can't understand the white evangelical embrace of the Great Pumpkin and his predecessors. A new book goes into the history of evangelicalism and traces its roots back to the beginning of the previous century, and the racism, misogyny and intolerance at its foundation.
Instead of theological criteria, what comes to define evangelicalism is instead your stance on issues of gender and sexuality, the embrace of patriarchal authority, belief in female submission. That’s how you determine who is in and out of the fold.
There's an excellent interview with the author in the Jacobin; I highly recommend reading it for the overview.
October 7
Oh fucking hell. Apparently the asshats that run AT&T are super-conservative and have been funding and supporting OAN, the right-wing propaganda outlet our departed Pumpkin loved so much. Which means I've (through my wireless bill) been supporting this whole mess since 1999, when I got my first cellphone.
“If there was any story involving Trump, we had to only focus on either the positive information or basically create positive information,” said Marissa Gonzales, an OAN producer from 2019 until she resigned in 2020. “It was never, never the full truth.”
October 4
I've been slowly traversing the archives of a blog called Last Stand on Zombie Island, where the author does a weekly post on different warships from the post Civil War era up until the present day. He's very good at the context of the time and place, and is able to find all kinds of fascinating examples from periods in history I wasn't ever aware of.
September 30
Six Colors has an excellent upgrade guide for the new iPhones based on your current model; you choose the one you have and it tells you what new stuff you'll get with one of the new models. I'm not ready to upgrade yet but I'll keep this handy for when we need to make the jump.
September 10
A long time ago, I worked with a bunch of guys who were hired from a Name Brand Consulting Firm to take our dot-com public. I was enlisted to build the pitch deck for the roadshow, which meant I was making edits to Powerpoint slides at all times of the day and night with these guys (they were all guys). One late afternoon, two of them were talking about catching important flights, and one of them claimed he'd called in a bomb scare to hold a flight at the gate until he could make it. This was before September 11, but I remember thinking how sociopathic that sounded, and revolted by how proud of himself he was.
Apparently this tactic doesn't work anymore.
